Hide Post CAIR RevealedBy INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Friday, August 31, 2007 4:20 PM PTTrail Of Terror: We've wondered why the Council on American-Islamic Relations director has spurned Senate invitations to answer terror charges. Now we know.Related Stories: Who Are CAIR's Paymasters? | CAIR's Fuzzy MathFor the first time, evidence in a major federal terror case puts CAIR's current executive director — Nihad Awad — at a Philadelphia meeting of alleged Hamas leaders that was secretly recorded by the FBI.After the Associated Press last week reported the bombshell, CAIR denied claims of ties to Hamas. "That's one of those urban legends about CAIR," said Parvez Ahmed, CAIR's chairman. "It's fed by the right-wing, pro-Israeli blogosphere."In fact, the evidence was revealed by an FBI agent who testified at the terror-financing trial under way in Dallas.Her name is Lara Burns, and she's the lead investigator in the case against operators of the Holy Land Foundation, the largest Muslim charity in America. CAIR, which she says received startup funding from HLF, is named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the case, according to court exhibits.President Bush froze HLF's funds after 9/11. It's now accused of being a Hamas front, and its leaders — including one of CAIR's founding directors — are on trial for allegedly funneling more than $12 million to aid Palestinian suicide-bombing operations.Burns placed both Awad and his ethnic-Palestinian pal Omar Ahmed, who founded CAIR with Awad, at a Philly meeting last decade where she says Hamas leaders and supporters hatched a plot to disguise funds for Hamas suicide operations as charity for HLF.According to FBI wiretaps, it was decided at the Hamas summit, which took place inside a Marriott hotel, that most of the funds collected by HLF in the future would be steered to Hamas.Awad, like Ahmad, does not talk much about his pre-CAIR days.But before 9/11, when Muslim groups received less scrutiny in America, he made his support for Hamas publicly known. At a March 22, 1994, symposium on the Middle East at Florida's Barry University, Awad said: "After I researched the situation inside and outside Palestine, I am in support of the Hamas movement."Three months later, he and Ahmad founded CAIR. They promote the group as a grass-roots champion of Muslim civil rights, a "Muslim NAACP." But many of the things CAIR's leaders claim and what we later learn from the factual record don't square.For instance, they've claimed that they get no foreign support and that their funding comes from local dues. In fact, the bulk of their support comes from two Arab countries tied to 9/11 — Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.They've claimed that the size of the Muslim population in America is 7 million. In fact, it's closer to 2 million.They've claimed that they're mainstream American patriots, when in fact they've told Muslim audiences that they want the Quran to replace the Constitution as the "highest authority in America."They've also claimed that they don't support terrorism, even as three senior employees have been jailed in terror-related cases.And now this. CAIR claims to be the voice of American Muslims. If so, it's been an especially loud one. But it has lost its credibility to speak honestly for any legitimate cause.

On Tuesday, the prosecution in the trial of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF) filed its motion in opposition to the amicus brief filed by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

In addition to picking apart the arguments laid out in CAIR’s brief piece by piece, the government set an important precedent, officially and definitively linking CAIR to Hamas, writing:In the instant case, striking CAIR’s name from the attachment to the Trial Brief will not prevent its conspiratorial involvement with HLF, and others affiliated with Hamas, from becoming a matter of public record. That has already occurred as a consequence of the presentation of evidence at trial. (emphasis added)The government also argues some legal basics, that CAIR has no standing to petition its removal from the list of unindicted co-conspirators since the list is not directly pertinent to the “actual, ongoing controversy” of HLF’s criminal trial, basically that, by filing the brief, CAIR has not acted as a “friend of the court,” but rather only out of self interest, and that, in the brief, CAIR has failed to show any injury as a result of its inclusion on the list of unindicted co-conspirators.In arguing lack of injury, the prosecution makes similar points outlined in the August 21st blog post by the Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT), CAIR’s Reputation and Incredibly Fluctuating Membership Roll. The motion states:

As support for its alleged injury-in-fact, CAIR provided this Court with data solely from a time period prior to the Government’s submission of its Trial Brief, a period when the alleged improper disclosure could not have affected such membership. CAIR alleges that the “negative reaction by the American public can be seen in the decline of membership rates and donations resulting from the government’s publicizing of CAIR as an unindicted coconspirator” (Amicus Br. at 10); that “the donations that they rely on for funding have suffered since the government named them as an unindicted coconspirator”( Amicus Br. at 38); and that “the government’s labeling of them as an unindicted co-conspirator has chilled their associational activity” (Amicus Br. at 51-52). In support for these assertions, however, CAIR relies upon a June 2007 article in the Washington Times, which revealed (by reviewing CAIR’s tax filings) that CAIR’s membership declined 90 percent from 2001 through 2006, down from 29,000 members to less than 1,700. ... The article provides no further factual information regarding CAIR’s declining membership since 2006. Ironically, the very same article, upon which it now relies, was publicly discredited by CAIR executive director, Nihad Awad, who claimed the article was “false and misleading."Additionally, the motion argues that the relationship between CAIR, HLF and the Islamic Association of Palestine (IAP) is already public information, as described in a footnote on page 12:The role of CAIR founder Omar Ahmad on the Palestine Committee, and the presence of Ahmad and Nihad Awad at the 1993 meeting of the Palestine Committee in Philadelphia, were described during the public trial of Muhammad Hamid Khalil Salah and Abdelhaleem Hasan Abdelraziq Ashqar in November 1996 (sic). See United States v. Salah, et al., Case No. 03-978 (N.D. Ill. 2006). During that trial, defendant Ashqar was represented by William B. Moffitt, author of CAIR’s current motion for leave to file an amicus brief.The government also argues that CAIR’s amicus brief should be denied because it lacks both timeliness and usefulness, and, as perhaps a final nail in the coffin, that the brief is wholly irrelevant since both testimony and documentary evidence admitted at trial conclusively demonstrate the conspiratorial relationship between CAIR and HLF. For some examples of such evidence, see:CAIR: Youngest Member of Hamas Family TreeCAIR Identified by the FBI as part of the Muslim Brotherhood's Palestine CommitteeCAIR Executive Director Placed at HAMAS MeetingSeptember 4, 2007 10:21 PM Print

I'm guessing that most of these people are Muslims, so I post this piece from yesterday's LA Times in this thread:============

Iranians in U.S. face a choice -- to speak out, or notGenaro Molina / LATUSC professor Muhammad Sahimi canceled a trip to Iran after hearing Ali Shakeri was heldSome openly lobby for a change in Iran; others are cautious, preferring to be able to visit their homeland without fear of arrest.By Tony Barboza, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer September 16, 2007 USC professor Muhammad Sahimi knew he risked interrogation or arrest while visiting Iran because of his outspokenness about the need for political reform in his homeland.

But it wasn't until this summer that he canceled his travel plans. He deemed a family trip to Iran too dangerous after his friend, Ali Shakeri, a mild-mannered businessman and peace activist from Lake Forest, was thrown in a Tehran prison.

"A lot of people are afraid to go to Iran," he said, "because they say if a guy like Shakeri, who always advocated peace and negotiations, gets arrested, then who is safe?"

The plight of Shakeri has created a dilemma for politically active Iranian Americans: Do they lobby for change in Iran, knowing that their words could land them in prison if they visit their homeland? Or do they keep quiet and preserve their ability to go home again?

Shakeri, 59, a businessman whose pro-democracy writings about Iran circulate on the Web, has been jailed for more than four months in Tehran. He had been on his way back from visiting his mother, who died while he was there.

Shakeri's case surprised the Iranian American community because he was seen as a moderate peace activist and a minor figure in Southern California. A board member for the Center for Citizen Peacebuilding at UC Irvine, Shakeri garnered international attention when he became one of four dual Iranian American citizens detained in Iran this year. Two have since been released.

His family had been working quietly to free him until Friday, when his son, Kaveh Shakeri, broke the silence and implored authorities to release his father.

"Shakeri really sent shock waves," said Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council, a Washington-based civic group. "Unlike the others, he was not a known figure on the national level. If someone like that gets taken, it becomes much more blurry who's a target and who's not."

That sentiment has rung especially true in Southern California, home to the world's largest community of Iranian emigres. Most settled in Southern California after the fall of Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi in 1979. Centered in West Los Angeles, the San Fernando Valley and Orange County, they now number more than 500,000.

Like the Cuban exile community in South Florida and Vietnamese expatriates of Orange County's Little Saigon, many Iranian Americans in the U.S. are advocates of democratic reform in their homeland. But they have had little success against the authoritative governments.

That doesn't stop some from trying to wield their influence from a distance, often through TV broadcasts, radio shows and online periodicals.

Ali Limonadi, producer and director of IRTV, a Persian-language international television station based in Studio City, said he had changed his e-mail address three times because of the nearly 1,500 virus-ridden e-mails a day he received. He said he believed those e-mails were generated by Iranian government agents.

Limonadi said he first spoke out in 1979 because he thought Islamic rule wouldn't last long in Iran.

He came to the United States a month after the 1979 revolution and planned to stay for a year. "I just didn't think the revolution would take that long," he said.

Others, however, have kept quiet about their political convictions, doing all they can to remain invisible to Tehran and preserve their ability to travel back and forth.

"Most of us in the U.S. don't really like what's going on in Iran, but whatever we say becomes a backlash against us," said Moe, a Rancho Santa Margarita engineer and dual citizen of Iran and the U.S. who asked that his last name be withheld to avoid attracting the attention of Iranian officials.

He has vowed to not speak about politics, hoping it will guarantee that he is not harassed or detained when he visits his mother and sister in Tehran every other year.

"If my mother over there doesn't do anything against the government, and I don't raise my voice in public either, we have nothing to worry about," he said.

Friends said Shakeri had no reason to be concerned either. They describe Shakeri as a political moderate who advocated nonviolent solutions, a stance that often earned him criticism for being a regime sympathizer.

"He got it on both sides," said Hossein Hedjazi, who featured Shakeri a handful of times as a guest on Golgasht, a Persian-language political commentary radio show he hosts on KIRN-AM (670).

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Mohammed Ali Dadkha, a Tehran human rights lawyer who said he had been contacted by Shakeri's family and was asked to defend him, said he had not been able to meet with Shakeri to sign forms authorizing him as his lawyer and had no idea what accusations Shakeri faced.

According to Iranian law, he said, "Nobody can be detained for more than two months unless new accusations are raised against him."

A spokesman for the Iranian Judicial Branch in Tehran who declined to give his name said Saturday that Shakeri's case was still under investigation and that he could not publicize the accusations against him, because "He has not been proven to be a criminal yet.

"I do hope his dossier will be clarified in the near future, like other cases recently," he added.

The Bush administration in May called for the release of Shakeri and the other three detainees, and the U.S. State Department has called the detainment of Shakeri and other dual nationals a "disturbing pattern" of harassment under the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

This summer the agency issued a travel warning urging Iranian American citizens traveling to Iran to be cautious, but it has been difficult to gauge whether they have made fewer trips.

Those who have not been back to their homeland in decades -- and don't plan to return under the current regime -- serve as the most vocal critics.

"What we have now is a new reign of terror, the goal being precisely ending this bridge between Iranian intellectuals and the diaspora community that was being created," said Abbas Milani, director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University.

Milani's house on campus is filled with reminders of his homeland -- Persian paintings, books and carpets. He cooks rice and kebabs for his son and listens to the Persian rock group Kiosk.

And although he dreams of returning to see the country on which he is considered a national expert, he has not been back since 1987, knowing that he might be apprehended.

"I won't buy that privilege at the price of self-censorship," he said.

Mariam Khosravani, a community services commissioner for the city of Irvine, said she made a conscious decision to enter into civic affairs in Orange County at the expense of visits home to her extended family in Tehran.

She said images like the photo that hangs in Khosravani's office in Fountain Valley -- her posing with former President Clinton at a campaign fundraiser for Sen. Hillary Clinton -- are precisely what many Iranian Americans are reluctant to be associated with.

"It's a sad feeling that you know you cannot go back to your motherland," she said. "It's not like my name is on a blacklist, but it's hard to take a chance going to a country where you can't guarantee your safety."

NEW YORK (WCBS 880) -- UPDATE: NYPD is rejecting the request from the President of Iran to visit Ground Zero.

NYPD is citing security reasons for the reason of rejecting President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's request to visit the old World Trade Center.

STATEMENT FROM NYPD:A request earlier this month to permit a visit by Iranian President Ahmadinejad to Ground Zero during the United Nations General Assembly was rejected in a meeting which included NYPD, Secret Service, and Port Authority officials. The site is closed to visitors because of construction there. That was the only request. Requests for the Iranian president to visit the immediate area would also be opposed by the NYPD on security grounds.

I don't know how reliable this website is, but I do know that the group being discussed here has crossed by radar screen previously:

Terrorists Training in Rural America? (A lot more info on these compounds including Pictures, articles,history etc. on our website www.ChristianAction.org)

CBNNews.com - RED HOUSE, Va. - Islamic extremists in the United States have traditionally set up shop in big cities with large Muslim populations: places like New York City, Dearborn, Michigan and even Washington, DC. But one secretive group is doing just the opposite.

They call themselves Muslims of America. They’ve established compounds throughout the rural U.S. Members say they moved to the countryside to lead peaceful lives free of “Western decadence.” But others say that doesn’t tell the whole story.

“Certainly, when you’re in a rural area it enables you to better escape from the prying eyes of law enforcement,” said CBN News consultant David Gartenstein-Ross.

He says Muslims of America has close ties to a violent Pakistani group named Jamaat Al-Fuqra. Both groups are led by the same extremist cleric: Sheikh Mubarak Gilani. “Sheikh Gilani is an extremist figure known to be very much involved in the jihads against India, also known to be very much anti-Semitic,” Gartenstein-Ross said.

Gilani’s images and messages are all over the Muslims of America Web site. He founded the group during a visit to Brooklyn in 1980. Shoe bomber Richard Reid and Beltway sniper John Allen Muhammed are said to have been among his followers.

Gilani encouraged his U.S. pupils-mostly African Americans-to move to rural areas and establish Muslim communes. The group now has dozens of these communes nationwide.

“Al Fuqra has compounds from coast-to-coast.and what this indicates is they’re going to areas where land is plentiful–where you can get land for relatively cheap prices,” Gartenstein-Ross said.

CBN News visited the group’s 45-acre site in Red House, Virginia - a town so small you can barely find it on a map. There are no traffic lights, and the only signs of industry are a pair of convenience stores. So when a street sign popped up named after a radical Pakistani sheikh-along with men and women dressed in traditional Islamic garb- the locals took notice. Sheikh Gilani has been on U.S. intelligence agencies’ radar for years. He’s currently under investigation for possible ties to al-Qaeda. He also trained jihadists to fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan during the 1980s. In addition, Gilani attended a 1993 jihadist conference in Sudan along with members of Hamas, Hezbollah and Osama bin Laden himself.

American journalist Daniel Pearl was on his way to interview Gilani in 2002 when he was murdered. The sheikh denies any involvement in Pearl’s killing.

CBN News spoke to a former member of Muslims of America who wishes to remain anonymous. ‘Mustafa’ says Gilani runs the group from Lahore, Pakistan. “He’s the leader of the group. He’s a former member of the Pakistani military. His father was one of the founding fathers of Pakistan. He has great connections to Pakistani intelligence, the ISI,” he said. Mustafa says Muslims of America serves as a cash cow for Gilani and Jamaat Al-Fuqra. Each member is required to send 30 percent of their income to Gilani. The group even had a treasurer that checked members’ pay stubs.

“He said that the 30 percent is money that God has chosen to take from you. And if you spend that 30 percent you are stealing from God,” Mustafa’ said. Group members hand deliver thousands of dollars in cash at a time to Gilani in Pakistan.

Mustafa said, “The money got to Pakistan through the elders who traveled to Pakistan. They carried cash with them or they sent it Western Union. Since there’s Americans under Gilani’s rule who live in Pakistan, it’s like from one American name to another American name and it’s never linked to Gilani at all.”

Sheikh Gilani uses these American dollars to help fund the Taliban and other terrorist groups, according to Mustafa. Muslims of America compounds are filled with ex-cons from rough backgrounds. Many converted to Islam in prison. Mustafa says there’s at least one semi-automatic weapon in every home.

A local law enforcement official told us he’s had no problems with Muslims of America in Red House. But the group has a long track record of violent activity on U.S. soil.

During the 80s and 90s, members firebombed Hindu and Hare Krishna temples and assassinated two rival Muslim leaders. Federal raids on the group’s Colorado compound in the early 90s turned up bombs, automatic weapons, and plans for terrorist attacks. And at least three members have been arrested on weapons charges since 9/11. Mustafa says the group raises money through a variety of criminal activities.

“A lot of the guys will do bootlegging–you know, it’s all illegal- videotapes, CDs, clothing,” he said. In March, federal investigators broke up a multi-state counterfeit goods ring. Local residents tell CBN News that some of those arrested lived at the Red House compound. Mustafa said, “The counterfeiting comes in with the bootlegging. It’s all counterfeit movies not sanctioned by Paramount or MGM or things like that — they’re not legitimate.”

Law enforcement sources say they’re keeping a close eye on Muslims of America compounds. “One of the law enforcement sources that I spoke to was concerned that you could have a Waco-type situation,” Gartenstein-Ross said. But a video on the group’s Web site calls into question just how seriously authorities understand the group’s beliefs and intentions. The clip shows the former head of South Carolina’s FBI branch speaking at a Muslims of America-sponsored event in 2004 that honored “diversity.” Mustafa says such “outreach” efforts are a mistake. He continues to fear for his safety since leaving the compound. But he says he’s speaking out because he considers Muslims of America a dangerous group. A lot more about the Muslims of America compounds including articles, Pictures , History Etc. on our website www.ChristianAction.orgcopy and paste this link into your browser to View the video from CBN News. mms://sm1.cbn.org/News/Archive/HighRes/EST30 Islamic Training Camp AM v2_000030p0000621p7.wmv

by Daniel PipesNew York PostOctober 29, 2001French version of this itemItalian version of this itemSpanish version of this itemHow many Muslims live in the United States?Until now, basically, no one has had any idea. By law, the U.S. Census cannot ask questions about religion. There are also plenty of other difficulties in coming up with a number, starting with the problem of defining who is a Muslim: Does one include non-standard believers like Louis Farrakhan and the Druze?Uncertainty has generated some wildly divergent numbers. A large 1990 demographic survey counted 1.3 million Muslims. In 1998, a Pakistani newspaper put the number at 12 million. Even the usually authoritative Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches found 527,000 American Muslims in 1996 and six times as many (3.3 million) in 1998.Needing some kind of consensus figure, Muslim organizations came up with a self-acknowledged "guestimation" of 6 million, which this year they decided to raise to 7 million.These numbers were so widely adopted (even by this writer) that they acquired a sheen of authority. But repetition does not transform a guess into a fact.The trouble is a generic one; religious organizations commonly inflate their membership to enhance their voice in the public square.Fortunately, the smog of imprecision finally lifted last week, with the appearance of two authoritative studies by highly regarded demographers. (Each study relied on respondents' religious self-identification.) Interestingly, they agreed on a very similar number, one much smaller than the old guestimate.The American Religious Identification Survey 2001 carried out by the Graduate Center of the City University of New York polled more than 50,000 people and found the total American Muslim population to be 1.8 million.Meanwhile, the University of Chicago's Tom Smith reviewed prior national surveys and (in a study sponsored by the American Jewish Committee) found that the best estimate puts the Muslim population in 2000 at 1,886,000. (With a nod toward figures supplied by Islamic organizations, he allowed that this number could be as high as 2,814,000 Muslims.)In other words, two authoritative studies carried out by scholars found that American Muslims number under 2 million - less than a third of the hitherto-consensus number.To this, the militant Islamic groups in Washington - widely but erroneously seen as representative of American Muslims - responded with predictable hyperbole. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) furiously accused Smith's report of working "to block Muslim political participation."The American Muslim Council (AMC) charged Smith with nothing less than trying to "deny the existence of 4 1/2 million American Muslims" and blamed him for "tearing at the very heart of America."The AMC also amusingly claimed that its own estimate of "more than 7 million" Muslims came from the 2000 Census figures - erroneously thinking that the Census asks about religion.Oh, and that's the same AMC which in 1992 pressured a researcher named Fareed Nu'man to find 6 million Muslims in the country; Nu'man later testified that he counted just 3 million and was fired by the AMC when he refused to inflate his number above 5 million.Why does the militant Islamic lobby insist on the 6-7 million figures? Because a larger number, even if phony, offers it enhanced access and clout. Convincing the Republican Party that Muslims number 8 million, for example, led to urgent calls from its chairman for "meeting with [Muslim] leaders," something which becomes less of a priority when the Muslim population turns out to be much smaller.Knowing the real number of Muslims will, most immediately, likely impede two militant Islamic efforts now underway: one (pushed by The Minaret magazine) to get Americans to acknowledge that their own misdeeds partially caused the atrocities of Sept. 11; and another (led by CAIR) to halt the U.S. military campaign in Afghanistan. The longer-range implications will be yet more significant.__________________Those who beat their swords into plowshares usually end up plowing for those who kept their swords.--Ben Franklin

Its the LA Slimes and the reporter's name appears to be Iranian (we have a lot of Iranians in LA-- many came here when the Shah fell) so read the following interesting piece with that in mind:===========

Trials tested Muslim's faith in AmericaOsama Awadallah credits help from Americans, including Jews, for his acquittal on perjury charges tied to his acquaintance with two 9/11 hijackers.By H.G. Reza, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer September 23, 2007

Managing a furniture store is not what Osama Awadallah had his sights on during college. But selling couches and dressers will do until an offer to develop computer information systems comes along.

His job opportunities are limited, he said, because of the notoriety from his friendship with two 9/11 hijackers. He was one of the hundreds of Muslim men jailed as material witnesses in the 9/11 investigation. After testifying before the grand jury, he was indicted on charges of perjury, and the experience caused him to question the American ideal of equal justice and democracy. At his first trial he was just one juror away from conviction and deportation. But his faith in this country was restored at the second trial when he was found not guilty in 2006.

"When I came to the United States I had these dreams about this beautiful country," Awadallah said in a recent interview. He came in 1999 as a student. "But after 9/11, I thought I was not in America. I was scared. Then I saw the goodness of the American people who believe in justice."

Sporting wire-rim glasses that blend into his round face, Awadallah tenses upon meeting strangers. The bushy beard he wore as a sign of his devotion to Islam has been cropped short, a compromise to help him get a foot in the corporate door.

Jogging and workouts have buffed up the scrawny frame he had when he was arrested in 2001.

Awadallah, 27, said his family elders did not want him to be interviewed for this article. "My family wants people to forget about me. At the same time, I want to make Americans aware of what's going on in their country. I don't think they understand their rights."

He met a reporter at the La Mesa condo of Mimi Pollack, a friend and teacher at Grossmont College in El Cajon, and was more than two hours late. After a tepid apology, he offered a brusque explanation that he is more careful now about whom he talks to because he "stopped trusting people" after his arrest.

Minutes later he began to relax and the furrowed brow was replaced by a warm grin. "Americans are great in their understanding," he said, gesturing toward Pollack.

His friendship with Pollack has endured even though she turned over to the FBI evidence that led to the two perjury counts lodged against him. Still, she believed in his innocence and was his most vocal advocate.

Despite his acquittal, Awadallah said he is still looked at with suspicion.

"There are non-Muslims who still think I had something to do with the attacks and Muslims who think I got my freedom because I'm working for the government. I can't control what people think. All I can do is move on."

Moving on means he wants to become a U.S. citizen, marry and "live like any American." Finding a woman to marry is a milepost in an American journey that for a while was like "a bad movie that turned real," he said.

He reached an important goal last year when he graduated from San Diego State with a business degree. His long-term goal is to become a doctor.

"I want to prove that I can be a good American citizen, but I can't get a job in my field because with a name like Osama, [employers] research me," he said. "They Google my name and get thousands of hits" about his trials and association with Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar, who were among the hijackers who crashed American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon.

He was a casual acquaintance of the two terrorists in 2000. He met them at the mosque in La Mesa and worked for about a month with Alhazmi at a service station. The FBI found his old telephone number in Alhazmi's car, which was parked at Dulles International Airport outside Washington, D.C., and detained him as a material witness on Sept. 21, 2001.

Authorities took him to New York City to testify before a federal grand jury. He was indicted on two counts of perjury because under questioning he said he could not remember Almihdhar's first name, though there was proof he knew it.

Awadallah had written a report about his summer for Pollack's class on English as a second language, and she gave the essay to the FBI. "One of the quietest people I have ever met is Nawaf and Khalid," he had written. He blames the contradiction in his testimony on his poor English and fear and confusion after being kept awake all night by guards.

Defense attorney Randall B. Hamud said Awadallah appeared at his bail hearing before then-federal Judge Michael Mukasey, now President Bush's nominee for attorney general, after being detained as a material witness. Bail was denied, and Hamud said he complained to Mukasey that jailers had beaten Awadallah.

"He looked at Osama and said, 'Your client looks fine to me. You can file a lawsuit if you want to,' " according to Hamud.

U.S. District Judge Shira A. Scheindlin later wrote that "many of Awadallah's allegations about his treatment during the weeks of incarceration are uncontested" and noted that government officials acknowledged he had multiple bruises on his body and a cut on his left hand.

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Trials tested Muslim's faith in AmericaSeptember 23 2007

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Awadallah said his ties to Alhazmi and Almihdhar "will fade with time," and the two hijackers "have been judged by God." The attacks were not sanctioned by Islam, he said, and there is no excuse for killing 3,000 innocent people.

Born in Venezuela, Awadallah is a Jordanian citizen of Palestinian descent. He said his family lost its property when Israel was established in 1948. Pollack described him as an "in-your-face Muslim" who engaged in passionate debates about Islam and Israel's treatment of Palestinians before his arrest.

He was also "very conflicted" about Jews, Hamud said.

Though he still criticizes Israel, Awadallah now discusses the volatile issues of the Middle East in "calmer, rational and mature" discussions, Pollack said.

If walls separate Jews and Muslims in America, they can be breached, Awadallah said.

"In America it is possible for people to work together. My case proves that," he said. "Maybe one day people will work together in Israel and there will be justice for Palestinians."

As is Pollack, many people who helped clear Awadallah were Jewish, including his three New York lawyers, several jurors, and Scheindlin, who presided over the case. She dismissed the charges against Awadallah in a 60-page opinion that said jailing him solely as a material witness was unlawful. An appeals court reinstated the charges.

Awadallah said he saw the irony of Jews' helping him.

"People like [juror] David Lipschultz knew there was justice to be served," he said. Lipschultz, a nurse, was the lone holdout for acquittal at Awadallah's first trial. "Civil rights isn't just something you read about in history," Lipschultz said in an interview.

Awadallah said his unsettling experience also had an upside; it broadened his contact with non-Muslims. Before his arrest, his life revolved mostly around mosque and school, where he kept to himself.

"The best people who treat foreigners well are Americans. So many nice people have helped me with my English, showing me places and going out together," he said. America "is still a home for freedom. I have no thoughts whatsoever that this is not a good country for Muslims."

Today's USA TODAY had an article on a subject that I've never seen addressed before, possible conflict between US Sunni's and Shite's.

Tension between Sunnis, Shiites emerging in USA

By Cathy Lynn Grossman, USA TODAY

When Muslim journalist S. Hussain Zaidi toured the USA recently, he was stunned by what he saw: Shiite and Sunni Muslims, whose conflicts have fueled the war in Iraq and tension in the Middle East and beyond, were praying together in U.S. mosques.

"It is something we never see at home," says Zaidi, of India. "They want to kill each other everywhere except in the USA."

For years, Sunnis and Shiites in this country have worked together to build mosques, support charities, register voters and hold massive feasts for Eid al-Fitr (on Oct. 13 this year in the USA), the celebration at the end of the holy month of Ramadan.

Now there are small signs of tension emerging in America's Muslim community that are raising concerns among many of its leaders. They worry that the bitter divisions that have caused so much bloodshed abroad are beginning to have an impact here. Such concerns are rising at a time when the USA's Muslim community has grown from less than 1 million in 1990 to nearly 2.5 million today, with two of three Muslims born overseas, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center.

"You have people who recently arrived from other places where things may have gotten out of hand," says Sheik Hamza Yusuf, the U.S.-born co-founder of the nation's first Muslim seminary, the Zaytuna Institute, in Berkeley, Calif. "It takes just one deranged person with a cousin back home who died in a suicide bombing to create trouble here."

Several recent incidents pointing to rising tension among Sunnis and Shiites here have led Muslim leaders to call on their followers to reach out to those in other sects. None of the incidents has been violent. But Yusuf and other leaders worry that these could be signs of increasingly cool relations between Sunnis and Shiites here or undermine other Americans' views of a religion that has been under particular scrutiny since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. Among the incidents:

•Shiite mosques and businesses in the Detroit area were vandalized in January, and a Shiite restaurant owner said he'd received a threatening call mentioning his sect.

Authorities have yet to identify the vandals. But some Shiite Muslims told local news media they believe Sunnis were behind the broken windows and graffiti because Shiites had celebrated publicly when former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, a Sunni, was executed in December by Iraq's Shiite-led government.

•On several Muslim websites in recent months, Sunnis and Shiites from Seattle to Manhattan have traded accusations that they have been rebuffed from worshiping at each other's mosques.

Meanwhile, a small Sunni group known as the Islamic Thinkers Society, which has branded Shiites as heretics and is known for distributing provocative leaflets in New York's Times Square, has gone online to urge its followers to "avoid" contact with a range of Islamic studies scholars and theologians, several at U.S. colleges.

•Muslim Student Associations on a few campuses, such as Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J., and the University of Michigan at Dearborn, have disagreed so vehemently over which sect could lead prayers that students sometimes have refused to pray together.

The factionalism on those campuses has cooled recently, but many observers worry it could return. They say it's partly a reflection of the rising numbers of Muslim students. "If you have nine Muslims in one MSA, they have to get along," says Muslim sociologist Eboo Patel, 31, of Chicago. "If you have 90, there's enough to break into splinter groups."Other Muslim activists, scholars and imams, who lead the important Friday communal prayers in the nation's 1,000 mosques, agree that the episodes partly reflect their community's growth and diversity in America.They fear such incidents could fuel "Islamophobia" — their term for irrational prejudice against anyone Islamic.

"The sad reality is that there are extremists" who selectively misuse Islamic teachings to justify their violence, says Ingrid Mattson, a professor of Islamic Studies at Hartford Seminary in Hartford, Conn., and the president of the USA's largest Muslim civic and social group, the Islamic Society of North America.

At the society's annual Labor Day weekend gathering — an event in suburban Chicago that was part academic seminar, part community rally and part reunion for more than 30,000 families — Mattson's keynote speech urged Muslims to "look beyond the seventh-century tribal society into which Islam was first revealed."

A split over succession

Sunnis and Shiites share belief in the five pillars of Islam — submission to God, daily prayer, fasting, charity and a pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in any able Muslim's life. But they split over Islam's spiritual leadership.The schism dates to the death of the prophet Mohammed in A.D. 632. Shiites believe that a relative, Ali ibn Abi Talib, had been named successor and that his son Ali, assassinated in 661, and grandson Hussein inherited the rightful imam's miraculous knowledge and powers.

Sunnis, however, believed the Muslim community should elect its leader based on scholarly merit, not heredity. They chose Abu Bakr, a companion of the prophet, instead.

By 680, the sects were at war. Hussein was killed at the battle of Karbala in modern-day Iraq that year, and to this day, Shiites mourn him and other martyred imams.

Since then, like Christians who waged religious wars across Europe for centuries over how to interpret the Bible or baptize a believer, Muslim sects and the legal schools within them have developed differing views on faith and practice, each certain that salvation is at stake.Among the world's estimated 1.4 billion Muslims, about 85% are Sunni and about 15% are Shiite.

For all the conflicts among Muslims abroad, those in America historically not only have gotten along, but assimilated to the point that their sects have become secondary. In a 2006 survey of 1,000 Muslim registered voters, about 12% identified themselves as Shiite, 36% said they were Sunni, and 40% called themselves "just a Muslim," according to the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

"America gives people the unique opportunity to leave cultural, historical baggage behind," CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper says. "We can serve as a model to the world of an Islam that is clear, calm, articulate, forthright and civil."

Even so, it's an opportunity a few Muslims in the USA refuse."I've seen people fight over how close their toes can be when they kneel in prayer. It's got to stop," says Imam Mohamed Magid of the All Dulles Area Muslim Society (ADAMS), which has seven mosques in the Washington, D.C., area.

ADAMS is primarily Sunni, but Magid has his own way of quelling sectarianism.

"We teach all the scholars and traditions, and we invite Shia and Sunni imams to lead prayers," says the Sudanese-born Magid. "We don't have to fight."

He says he was heartened when 10,000 people at the Islamic Society event cheered for a new Muslim Code of Honor, pledging Sunni and Shiite respect and cooperation.

The code, drafted by the Muslim Public Affairs Council, a civil rights group, initially was circulated in Southern California after the Detroit vandalism incidents. It moved quickly to Michigan and then to the leadership of several major U.S. and Canadian Muslim political, social and religious groups.

In June, a half-dozen groups launched an "American Muslim Iraq Peace Initiative" intended to build harmony and make clear that "America cannot be a scene of conflict," says Nihad Awad, executive director of CAIR.

Besides the efforts to encourage dialogue, there's another phenomenon that could help ward off sectarian friction here: the inexorable force of assimilation.

At a time when rising numbers of American Protestants are attending non-denominational community churches and referring to themselves simply as Christians rather than Baptists, Methodists or Lutherans, a similar thing is happening among Muslims in the USA.

"It's a whole new era," says Patel. "The bulk of the American Muslim community is overwhelmingly young, under age 40. And they are experiencing a huge momentum toward 'big-tent Islam.' "

"We don't want to be defined by the classifications of history and the Middle East. The Quran is our authority," says Salim Al-Marayati, executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council. Al-Marayati, a Shiite married to a Sunni, expects to see 10,000 Muslims of all sects celebrate the Eid with the Islamic Center of Southern California next month in Los Angeles.

He calls himself "Sushi," the popular term for a combination of Sunni and Shiite. Once the glib nickname for the children of intermarried couples, it has become shorthand for Muslims who blur sectarian lines.

All that mixing and melding comes to life at the Islamic Society gathering's annual bazaar and the matrimonial meet-up events — the Islamic equivalent of speed dating for singles whose religion bans Western-style dating.

The five-acre bazaar at a convention center in Rosemont, outside Chicago, is a cacophony of blaring music and kaleidoscopic colors, with booths featuring honey, saris, music, travel, bank services, real estate, silver, shampoo, funeral services — and ideas, as well.

There were Sunni and Shiite book stands, promotions for online education programs, and booths for major Muslim political and social groups. Several federal agencies had stands just aisles away from where entrepreneurs hawked T-shirts emblazoned with slogans such as "Frisk Me, I'm Muslim."

At the adjacent Hyatt Hotel grand ballroom, a more familiar form of unity is the focus: marriage.

At each of two "matrimonial events," 200 women, ages 18 and up, were seated at 40 tables, with an empty seat between each woman so 200 men could rotate around the room, chatting with each woman for a few minutes before jumping to the next chair.

Zipping from chair to chair in the ballroom, "I don't think I even had time to ask a girl whether she was Sunni or Shia," says Faizan Arshad, a 24-year-old medical student in Chicago who's discussing a future with a woman he met that day. "To split hairs about sect did not seem the best use of my time," he says in a later e-mail.

Arshad is typical, says Patel, author of Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim. Patel, a Shiite, is married to a Sunni and says they want their "Sushi" child to grow up "fluent in all the multiple rituals and practices of Islam."

Or perhaps Patel's child will be more like Sarah Soliman, 17, of Cincinnati, daughter of Egyptian-born Sunni parents and a conference organizer for the Islamic Society's teen wing, Muslim Youth of North America.

"I didn't know until I was in middle school that there were any differences among us," Sarah says, "and I still don't get the split."__________________

McLEAN, Va. (AP) - A private Islamic school supported by the Saudi government should be shut down until the U.S. government can ensure the school is not fostering radical Islam, a federal panel recommends.In a report released Thursday, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom broadly criticized what it calls a lack of religious freedom in Saudi society and promotion of religious extremism at Saudi schools.Particular criticism is leveled at the Islamic Saudi Academy, a private school serving nearly 1,000 students in grades K-12 at two campuses in northern Virginia's Fairfax County.

The commission's report says the academy hews closely to the curriculum used at Saudi schools, which they criticize for promoting hatred of and intolerance against Jews, Christians and Shiite Muslims.

"Significant concerns remain about whether what is being taught at the ISA promotes religious intolerance and may adversely affect the interests of the United States," the report states.

The commission, a creation of Congress, has no power to implement policy on its own. Instead, it makes recommendations to other agencies.The commission does not offer specific criticism of the academy's teachings beyond its concerns that it too closely mimics a typical Saudi education.

The report recommends that the State Department prevail on the Saudi government to shut the school down until the school's textbooks can be reviewed and procedures are put in place to ensure the school's independence form the Saudi Embassy.

Messages left Wednesday with the State Department and the Saudi Embassy were not immediately returned.

Several advocacy groups in recent years have cited examples of inflammatory statements in religious textbooks in Saudi Arabia, including claims that a ninth-grade textbook reads that the hour of judgment will not come "until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them."Saudi officials said they have worked in recent years to reform the textbooks and the curriculum, but critics say progress has been insufficient.

The school's director-general, Abdalla I. Al-Shabnan, said Wednesday that he had not seen the report. But he said the academy has adjusted its curriculum in recent years and removed some of the inflammatory language that had been included in the Saudi text. The school's curriculum may now serve as a model for the Saudi government to use in continuing its reform of Saudi schools, he said.

"There is nothing in our curriculum against any religion," Al-Shabnan said.He also said he is willing to show the school's curriculum and textbooks to anybody who wants to see them, and he expressed disappointment that the commission did not request materials directly from the school."We have an open policy," he said.

He also pointed out that many of the school's teachers are Christian and Jewish.

The commission based its findings in part on a the work of a delegation that traveled to Saudi Arabia this year. The commission asked embassy officials to review the textbooks used in Saudi schools generally and at the Islamic Saudi Academy specifically but did not receive a response.Commission spokeswoman Judith Ingram said the commission did not request to speak to academy officials because that went beyond the commission's mandate.

The report also criticizes the school's administrative structure, saying it is little more than an offshoot of the Saudi Embassy, with the Saudi ambassador to the United States serving as chairman of the school's board of directors. The structure "raises serious concerns about whether it is in violation of a U.S. law restricting the activities of foreign embassies."After the Sept. 11 attacks, critics questioned the nature of the religious education at the Saudi academy. The school again found itself in the spotlight in 2005, when a former class valedictorian, Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, was charged with joining al-Qaida while attending college in Saudi Arabia and plotting to assassinate President Bush.Abu Ali was convicted in federal court and sentenced to 30 years in prison. He is appealing his conviction.

(Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)__________________

The Left is up in arms over the effort to hold an Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week on American college campuses. The goal of the Week is to alert Americans to the threat from Islamo-Fascism and to focus attention on the violent oppression of Muslim women under theocracies in Iran, Saudi Arabia, the Sudan and other Islamic states. It has been attacked as “Islamophobic” and “racist” by the Muslim Students Association, the Revolutionary Communist Party, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee and FoxNews Channel’s Alan Colmes. Is this not puzzling? Why would the left – which claims to be anti-fascist, anti-sexist and progressive -- oppose Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week rather than support it? Why isn’t the left outraged by the genital mutilation of women in countries such as Nigeria, Somalia and Yemen, or the sanctioning of wife-beating under Islamic law in Pakistan and other Islamic states? Across America, Women’s Studies programs will teach students about the oppression of women in Peoria and Ann Arbor but not in Teheran or Riyadh. Why not? Why isn’t the left appalled by the jihad – the holy war that has been declared against the West, and by the sanctifying of murderers as holy “martyrs” when Muslim terrorists kill innocent Americans, Christians and Jews? Perhaps it is because the left is engaged in its own jihad or holy war – and against the same targets: the Great Satan, America, and the little one in the Middle East. As the left’s response shows, it is not only indifferent to the issues of Islamic terror and oppression, which the campus protest hopes to discuss, it is ready to declare war on anyone who wants to raise them. We are all familiar with the way the left wages its political wars. If someone happens to disagree with its position on racial issues –if one believes, for example, that government enforced racial preferences are misguided or immoral –the left will denounce that person as a “racist.” In our culture, this is the moral equivalent of a bullet in the head. If the president of Harvard cites scientific data that women have different aptitudes for mathematics (lower) and verbal subjects (higher) than men, the left will denounce him as a “sexist,” another cultural bullet in the head. If a person believes that children should not be instructed about sex in public schools at the kindergarten level, the left will denounce her as a “homophobe” – one more mortal blow. And, so, if students attempt to discuss the holy war that Muslim fascists have declared against the West, the left can be expected to denounce them as Islamophobes, and bigots too. To make the point, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee will send threatening letters to 100 university presidents across the country urging them to deny a platform to students who are practicing “hate speech.” And liberal TV anchors will defend the witch-hunt.Here is an excerpt from an exchange that took place between FoxNews Channel anchor Alan Colmes and myself, over my efforts to organize Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week:Alan Colmes: “The words, the phrase ‘Islamo-fascism’ is hate speech. It equates an entire religion with fascism. That’s what people object to. It conflates the two, and it’s wrong.” In other words, students can’t even hold a discussion about “Islamo-Fascism” because the idea itself is hateful, is forbidden. This argument clearly doesn’t make sense. Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week is explicitly designed to raise public awareness about the oppression of Muslim women by Islamic radicals who abuse them. How can that be equating all Muslims with oppressors? The term “Islamo-Fascism” was itself coined by moderate Muslims in Algeria who were being slaughtered in the tens of thousands by Islamic radicals bent on jihad. How does using a term invented by Muslims to describe their oppressors equate all Muslims with the fascists?Does the term “Italian Fascism” equate all Italians with fascism? Or does it just identify those Italians who were followers of Mussolini? Is the term “Italian Fascism” hate speech? What about the term “white racism?” By Colmes’ logic, such a term equates an entire race– including Alan Colmes – with racism, and is therefore hate speech.Obviously, the attacks on Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week by liberals such as Colmes and radicals such as the Revolutionary Communist Party and the Muslim Students Association are based on reasoning that is absurd. Their only logic is emotional, and the character of that emotion is hatred -- hatred for those who want to raise awareness of the threats we face from radical Islam. This hatred has only one purpose, which is to put a metaphorical bullet in the head of those who oppose the jihad. The purpose is to silence them. David Horowitz is the author of numerous books including an autobiography, Radical Son, which has been described as “the first great autobiography of his generation.” It chronicles his odyssey from radical activism in the ‘60s to his current position as the head of the David Horowitz Freedom Center and who one journalist has called "the left's most articulate nemesis." His book, The Art of Political War was described by White House political strategist Karl Rove as “The perfect guide to winning on the political battlefield.” Left Illusions is an anthology of 40 years of his writings. His latest books are The Professors, which documents the debasement of the academic curriculum by tenured leftists, The Shadow Party, which describes the radical left's control of the Democratic Party's electoral machine and Indoctrination U., which is an in-depth look at how indoctrination has taken the place of education in today's college classrooms.__________________“If you will not fight for right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory is sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.” - Winston Churchill

In a setback for the government's efforts to cut off fund raising for Islamic extremists, a federal judge in Dallas declared a mistrial on most charges in the largest U.S. terror-financing case.

Prosecutors are expected to retry the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development and five of its leaders after an unusual courtroom dispute when three jurors disagreed with some of the acquittals being read by a jury foreman.

U.S. District Judge A. Joe Fish sent the jurors back to resolve their differences, but after about an hour the jurors told him 11 of the 12 felt that a unanimous decision couldn't be reached on most of the charges. The jury had agreed on some acquittals. But on the others the judge declared a mistrial.

The Justice Department, citing a gag order by the judge, declined to comment. Defense lawyers said the mistrial showed the government's case is fatally flawed.

It isn't clear whether the collapse of the case will affect how the Justice Department handles other pending cases involving alleged terror actions. One such case involves the Islamic American/African Relief Agency, which, along with five of its employees, was indicted earlier this year on charges including money laundering and violating sanctions against Iraq, prior to the U.S. invasion. The Treasury Department designated the charity as a terror group.

The Holy Land foundation was one of the biggest Islamic charities in the U.S. before it was raided and shut down by the Treasury Department in December 2001. It said that it focused on disaster relief, and aiding Muslim children and families left homeless or poor by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

FBI agents and Israeli officials, however, testified in the two-month trial that Holy Land funneled millions of dollars to Hamas, which has carried out suicide bombings in Israel. The U.S. government designated Hamas a terrorist group in 1995, making financial transactions with it illegal. President Bush announced the seizure of Holy Land's assets in December 2001, calling the action "another step in the war on terrorism."

Prosecutors put on a lengthy, complex case alleging a wide-ranging conspiracy by Islamic militants stretching back to the 1980s. Charges included material support for a terrorist organization, money laundering, racketeering and tax violations.

Defense lawyers said the activists were seeking to provide humanitarian aid to their distressed brethren in Gaza and the West Bank, and emphasized the lack of any direct connection between money raised in the U.S. and suicide bombings in Israel.

The case was closely followed by other Islamic groups in the U.S. and the greater Islamic community, which says Muslims in this country have come under unfair scrutiny since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

"It seems clear that the majority of the jury agreed with many observers of the trial who believe the charges were built on fear, not facts, " said Parvez Ahmed, chairman of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. "This is a stunning defeat for prosecutors and a victory for America's legal system."

Prosecutors believe they may have relied too heavily on witnesses and evidence from Israel that was discounted by the jury, and that the prosecution was unnecessarily complex when the laws are written broadly enough to present various acts as clear and simple violations, according to a person familiar with their thinking.

DALLAS, Oct. 22 — A federal judge declared a mistrial on Monday in what was widely seen as the government’s flagship terrorism-financing case after prosecutors failed to persuade a jury to convict five leaders of a Muslim charity on any charges, or even to reach a verdict on many of the 197 counts.

Noor Elashi, daughter of one of the defendants, Ghassan Elashi, said after the trial ended that she considered him a hero. The case, involving the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development and five of its backers, is the government’s largest and most complex legal effort to shut down what it contends is American financing for terrorist organizations in the Middle East.

President Bush announced he was freezing the charity’s assets in December 2001, saying that the radical Islamic group Hamas had “obtained much of the money it pays for murder abroad right here in the United States.”

But at the trial, the government did not accuse the foundation, which was based in a Dallas suburb, of paying directly for suicide bombings. Instead, the prosecution said, the foundation supported terrorism by sending more than $12 million to charitable groups, known as zakat committees, which build hospitals and feed the poor.

Prosecutors said the committees were controlled by Hamas and contributed to terrorism by helping Hamas spread its ideology and recruit supporters. The government relied on Israeli intelligence agents, using pseudonyms, to testify in support of this theory.

But prosecutors appeared to have made little headway in convincing the jury.

The case involved 197 counts, including providing material support to a foreign terrorist organization. It also involved years of investigation and preparation, almost two months of testimony and more than 1,000 exhibits, including documents, wiretaps, transcripts and videotapes dug up in a backyard in Virginia.

After 19 days of deliberations, the jury acquitted one of the five individual defendants on all but one charge, on which it deadlocked. A majority of the jurors also appeared ready to acquit two other defendants of most charges, and could not reach a verdict on charges against the two principal organizers and the foundation itself, which had been the largest Muslim charity in the United States until the government froze its assets in late 2001.

James T. Jacks, the first assistant United States attorney, said in court that the government would retry the case. Both prosecutors and defense lawyers have been barred from discussing the case in the press, and Chief Judge A. Joe Fish said that order continued in force.

The decision is “a stunning setback for the government, there’s no other way of looking at it,” said Matthew D. Orwig, a partner at Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal here who was, until recently, United States attorney for the Eastern District of Texas.

“This is a message, a two-by-four in the middle of the forehead,” said Mr. Orwig, who was appointed by President Bush and served on the United States attorney general’s advisory subcommittee on terrorism and national security. “If this doesn’t get their attention, they are just in complete denial,” he said of Justice Department officials, who he said might not have recognized how difficult such cases are to prosecute.

David D. Cole, a professor of constitutional law at Georgetown University, said the jury’s verdict called into question the government’s tactics in freezing the assets of charities using secret evidence that the charities cannot see, much less rebut. When, at trial, prosecutors “have to put their evidence on the table, they can’t convict anyone of anything,” he said. “It suggests the government is really pushing beyond where the law justifies them going.”

And Jimmy Gurulé, who was an under secretary of the Treasury when that agency froze Holy Land’s assets, described the outcome as “the continuation of what I now see as a trend of disappointing legal defeats” in terror-financing cases. Two previous cases, in Illinois and in Florida, ended with hung juries and relatively minor plea deals, he said.

In the Holy Land case, defense lawyers told the jury that their clients did not support terrorism but were humanitarians trying to lessen suffering among impoverished Palestinians. Though their clients may have expressed support for Hamas, the defense argued, that was before the United States government designated it as a terrorist organization in 1995.

The outcome of the trial emerged during a morning of confusion for jurors and those on both sides of the case, who had been waiting to hear the verdict since the jury returned it on Oct. 18. It was sealed until Monday because Chief Judge Fish had been out of town.

In the verdict, the jury said it failed to reach a decision on any of the charges against the charity and two of its main organizers, but acquitted three defendants on almost all counts.------------

But in a highly unusual development, when the judge polled the jurors on Monday, three members said that verdict did not represent their views. He sent them off to deliberate again; after about 40 minutes, they said they could not continue. In the end, one defendant, Mohammed El-Mezain, was acquitted on all but one charge, involving conspiracy, on which the jury failed to reach a verdict. A mistrial was declared on that count, and on all the other counts involving the other defendants.

The exact nature of the jurors’ disputes, and their reasoning in the cases, remained unclear after the verdict. Chief Judge Fish barred reporters from trying to contact the jurors, although he said he would provide jurors with reporters’ telephone numbers if they wanted to discuss the case.

One juror said the panel had found little evidence against three defendants and was evenly split on charges against Shukri Abu Baker, the former charity’s president, and Ghassan Elashi, its chairman.

“I understand there’s no magical mystery check with ‘Hamas’ written on it, but over all the case was pretty weak,” said the juror, William Neal, 33, an art director from Dallas. “There really was nothing there for me, no concrete evidence.” Mr. Neal said the government should not retry the case — a call picked up by Holy Land’s supporters, who packed the courtroom during the trial, and who carried some defendants around on their shoulders outside the courthouse chanting “Praise God” in Arabic.

“The government spent 13 years and came back empty-handed,” said Khalil Meek, who is president of the Muslim Legal Fund of America and spokesman for an alliance called Hungry for Justice. “I would call that a victory — an overwhelming defeat for the government.”

Lawyers for some defendants said their clients were being prosecuted because of their family ties to Hamas leaders. One defendant, Mufid Abdulqader, is the half-brother of Khalid Mishal, a Hamas leader who has been designated as a terrorist by the United States government.

Another Hamas official and designated terrorist, Mousa abu Marzook, is married to a cousin of Mr. Elashi, who was sentenced last year to almost seven years in prison for having financial dealings with Mr. Marzook and for violating export laws.

Mr. Elashi’s daughter Noor, who was in the courtroom every day during the trial, said she considered her father a hero. “He was singled out for feeding and clothing and educating the children of Palestine,” she said. “Giving charity to the Palestinian people has become a crime in this country.”

Akhtar Hussain Muawia worked in a Jersey City bodega following his alleged assassination of Shia leader Mahmood Shah in Pakistan in 1997.

The store, run by Muawai’s brother-in-law, is suspected of laundering money for a terror group.

A Jersey City grocery clerk had a secret life before he started stocking shelves: He was a Pakistani assassin wanted for a decade-old murder, law enforcement sources said.

Akhtar Hussain Muawia sneaked into the country under an assumed name less than a year after the murder of a top Shia leader, moved in with his sister and worked in his brother-in-law's Mashaallah Grocery, the sources said.

Muawia was allegedly a favored assassin with the SSP, which has been blamed for the massacres of scores of Pakistani civilians as it pushed a pro-Sunni, anti-American agenda.

An SSP cell was first discovered in New York City in 2003, when investigators raided a Brooklyn apartment and found recruitment documents and membership forms, sources said.

Another SSP member was deported after being caught in 2004 photographing the Brooklyn and Williamsburg bridges.

Federal immigration officials arrested Muawia's brother-in-law, Mumtaz Ahmed, 47, last October, as part of a money-laundering investigation, sources said. Muawia was arrested at the same time and charged with being in the country illegally. Ahmed was eventually deported, but Muawia was let go.

Aside from his brush with immigration, Muawia remained under the radar until the NYPD analyst began piecing together his history in February last year.

By March this year, the Ivy League analyst felt he had pulled together enough information to prove the Jersey City grocery clerk was the wanted assassin.

A month later, the NYPD tracked Muawia to Jersey City, and put him under surveillance. The NYPD contacted the Newark Joint Terrorism Task Force and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which arrested him in early May.

A Washington, D.C., imam states explicitly on the website for his organization that he is part of a movement working toward replacement of the U.S. government with "the Islamic State of North America" by 2050.

With branches in Oakland, Los Angeles, San Diego, Sacramento and Philadelphia, the group As-Sabiqun – or the Vanguard – is under the leadership of Abdul Alim Musa in the nation's capital.

Musa's declaration of his intention to help lead a takeover of America was highlighted by noted Islam observer Robert Spencer on his website Jihad Watch.

Spencer told WND that figures such as Musa should not be ignored, "Not because they have the power to succeed, but because they may commit acts of violence to achieve their purpose."

Musa's website declares: "Those who engage in this great effort require a high level of commitment and determination. We are sending out a call to the believers: Join with us in this great struggle to change the world!"

Musa launched the group in the early 1990s at the Al-Islam mosque in Philadelphia. His group says it is influenced by the writings and life work of Muslim thinkers and leaders such as Muslim Brotherhood founder Hasan al-Banna, Sayyid Qutb and Iranian revolutionary Ayatollah Khomenei.

The writings of Al-Banna and Qutb figured prominently in al-Qaida's formation.

Musa's organization says its leadership "has delivered numerous speeches in the United States and abroad, contributing their analyses and efforts to solve contemporary problems in the Muslim world and in urban America."

Abdul Alim Musa

"The paramount goal of the movement is the establishment of Islam as a complete way of life in America," the group declares. "This ultimate goal is predicated on the belief – shared by many Muslims worldwide – that Islam is fully capable of producing a working and just social, political, economic order."

The groups says it does not "advocate participation in the American political process as an ideal method for advancing Islamic issues in the U.S.; instead, it believes in a strong and active outreach to the people of the U.S."

Spencer told WND he does not know of any direct influence Musa has on prominent Muslim leaders or on U.S. policymakers, but he says it's "unclear how much 'mainstream' Muslim leaders harbor similar hopes – because no one dares question them about it."

As WND reported, the founder of the leading Islamic lobby group CAIR, the Council on Islamic-American Relations, reportedly told a group of Muslims in California they are in America not to assimilate but to help assert Islam's rule over the country. CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper also has said, in a newspaper interview, he hopes to see an Islamic government over the U.S. some day, brought about not by violence but through "education."

In London last summer, as WND reported, Muslims gathered in front of the London Central Mosque to applaud fiery preachers prophesying the overthrow of the British government – a future vision that encompasses an Islamic takeover of the White House and the rule of the Quran over America.

Musa says he wants to avoid what he calls an "absolutist" outlook on "the advancement of Muslims."

His group's philosophy is to stress unity between the various streams of Islam "in the attainment of common goals."

Although As-Sabiqun is a Sunni movement, it has publicly voiced support for Shia movements and organizations such as the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran and the Iranian-backed group Hezbollah, which waged war on Israel in the summer of 2006.

Musa, the group says, repeatedly has "stressed that the tendency by some Muslims to focus on the differences between Sunni and Shia Islam at this juncture in history is counterproductive to the goals of the Islamic movement as a whole."

The group says it encourages social-political advancement concurrent with a program of spiritual and moral development according to the Quran and Sunnah, compilations of stories from the life of Islam's prophet Muhammad.

The group says it has a six-point plan of action which is implemented at each location where a branch of the movement is established.

Establishing a mosque "as a place to worship Allah in congregation and as a center of spiritual and moral training.""Calling the general society" to embrace Islam.Establishing a full-time school "that raises children with a strong Islamic identity so they can, as future Islamic leaders, effectively meet and deal with the challenges of growing up in the West."Establishing businesses to "make the movement financially stable and independent."Establishing "geographical integrity by encouraging Muslims of the community to live in close proximity" to the mosque.Establishing "social welfare institutions to respond to the need for spiritual and material assistance within the community as well as the general society."In addition to daily classes, each mosque in the movement "also provides youth mentorship, marriage counseling, a prison outreach program, and employment assistance for ex-convicts."

As-Sabiqun says its branch in Los Angeles "was instrumental in creating a free health clinic in cooperation with other Islamic groups. The headquarters branch in D.C. has developed scout programs for young members of the community."

The group says the inspiration for its name comes from Quran, 9:100:

"The vanguard (as-Sabiqun) of Islam – the first of those who forsook their homes, and of those who gave them aid, and also those who follow them in all good deeds – well-pleased is Allah with them, as are they with Him: For them hath He prepared Gardens under which rivers flow, to dwell therein forever: that is the supreme Felicity."

The little-known mutual fund Amana Income Fund is one of this year's top performers. It can thank Islamic law for that.

The Amana fund is a specialized fund that invests based on Islamic religious principles. That means it must avoid, among other things, investing in banks or other firms that earn money by charging interest. Nor can it invest in companies carrying lots of debt.

This year these restrictions are paying off. The fund, which seeks well-established companies paying dividends, has largely avoided the mortgage-related carnage hitting the markets since the summer. The Amana Income Fund has returned 13% since the start of this year, and is ranked in the top 2% of its category. With shares of many banks and brokerage houses having plunged amid concerns over losses on mortgage-related securities, the average stock income fund is up only 3.6%, according to fund tracker Lipper Inc.

"It's good that you don't have [banks and financial companies] in periods like this year," says Nicholas Kaiser of Saturna Capital Corp., Bellingham, Wash., which manages the Amana funds. "It's great to be out of it."

Indeed, most mutual funds that invest based on Islamic principles have largely weathered the recent credit turmoil. Two Islamic funds offered by Azzad Asset Management, smaller than the Amana and its $333.1 million of assets, also are beating the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index since the start of this year, after trailing the broad market for several years.

Dow Jones Islamic Fund is up 13.3% year to date, which ranks it in the top 4% of its category of large- market-capitalization stocks. The fund, managed by Allied Asset Advisors, tracks the Dow Jones Islamic Market Index, which is a product of Dow Jones & Co., publisher of The Wall Street Journal.

A sister Amana fund, Amana Growth Fund, isn't doing quite as well. The fund has $680 million of assets and invests in companies whose earnings are expected to rise faster than the broader market. It has returned 11.5% this year. While that beats the broader market, it still trails its growth-type peers by 1.4 percentage points.

Mr. Kaiser says the fund is basically looking for growth stocks that have such "value" characteristics as "reasonable" share price-to-earnings multiples, but this year the best performers were highflying stocks like Google Inc. "So some of our stocks didn't do well this year," he says.

Apart from financial stocks, Islamic funds, like other faith-based funds, also screen out so-called sin stocks, including alcohol, tobacco, gambling and weapons makers. They also must shun companies in pork-processing businesses and companies with a debt level higher or equal to 33%.

These rules eliminate from consideration about half of all the publicly traded stocks in the U.S. Out of the Russell 3000 Index -- which includes the 3,000 largest U.S. companies based on market capitalization and represents about 98% of U.S. stocks -- Amana has about 1,500 companies to choose from. By comparison, KLD Research & Analytics, a social-investing research firm, contains 2,100 stocks in its broad index.

Faith-based or socially conscious mutual funds -- there are numerous varieties -- tend to underperform the broader market. That is often because their blanket prohibition of certain sectors means they automatically rule out some good-performing stocks. At the same time, the added stock-picking research required by their social or religious criteria increases the cost of running such funds.

Amana funds have been a powerful rebuttal to this notion. In the past five years, both are among the top-returning funds in their respective categories, returning about 20% on an annualized basis.

Some of Amana's investment rules -- for instance, low turnover in buying and selling stocks, and aversion to debt -- make investing sense for long-term investors, says David Kathman, an analyst with Morningstar Inc.

Because of the low-debt restriction, Amana has found some good investments. Its growth fund started buying Washington Group International Inc., a construction firm, in January 2006 at $55 a share after Mr. Kaiser spotted its zero-debt level. "This looks good for us," he recalls saying. Amana recently sold the stock at $91.50 after the shares rallied on a takeover offer.

• The News: One of the top-performing mutual funds this year is Amana Income Fund, a little-known fund that adheres to Islamic principles.• Behind the Scenes: Because Amana must avoid companies that earn money by charging interest or those with large debt loads, it has been largely spared fallout from the credit crunch.• Bottom Line, for Now: Amana's returns belie the tendency of faith-based or socially conscious mutual funds to underperform the broader market.The Islamic rules have helped Amana dodge some bullets. Enron Corp., which then fit growth-fund criteria, was ruled out from Amana Growth Fund's holdings -- before the scandal was exposed -- because its debt level exceeded the 33% threshold, Mr. Kaiser says.

Saturna Capital uses guidelines set up and endorsed by the Fiqh Council of North America, an organization of religious scholars dealing with issues concerning Muslims in North America.

Islamic law also forbids frequent trading of shares, since that is seen as a form of gambling. As a result, the turnover in the portfolios at Amana funds averages around just 10% each year, compared with 50% or more at a typical mutual fund. Lack of turnover is a contributor to performance, since shareholders are taxed for capital gains when managers sell stocks and make gains, and because of lower trading fees.

The 61-year-old Mr. Kaiser, who isn't Muslim himself, is concerned about the subprime spillover to his funds. As a big part of the U.S. economy "is based on home buying and loans -- that's going to drop off quite a bit," he says, leading people to cut consumption in retails and gasoline. "We have a lot of [those] stocks in our portfolios. If we have a major recession, I don't think we are immune from it just because we are not in those [financial] sectors," he said.

Amana's consistent performance appears to be attracting more non-Muslim investors. In the past 18 months, the two funds have increased from $288 million in assets to more than $1 billion combined. Of course, it is impossible to know for certain the religious persuasion of any given investor in a mutual fund, but by their names "we can pretty much tell they are non-Muslims," Mr. Kaiser says. "They just went for performance."

House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers Jr. has been asked by a Muslim group to pressure the Justice Department on its behalf. (Getty Images)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------The Council on American-Islamic Relations is seeking help from House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers Jr. to pressure the Justice Department to change the group's status as a co-conspirator in a terrorism case.

CAIR officials recently met with Mr. Conyers, Michigan Democrat, and then wrote a letter asking him to lobby the new attorney general on behalf of the group, and to hold hearings.

CAIR is among several hundred Muslim groups listed as unindicted co-conspirators in a recent federal terrorism trial in Dallas into activities by the Holy Land Foundation Inc., a group linked to funding the Palestinian Hamas terrorist group. The trial recently ended in a mistrial and prosecutors have said they plan to re-try the case. Despite its uncertain outcome, the trial has produced a large amount of information and evidence identifying U.S. and foreign groups sympathetic to or direct supporters of international Islamist terrorists. A 1991 internal memorandum from the radical Muslim Brotherhood identified 29 front groups, including the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), that are part of a covert program by the Brotherhood in the United States to subvert American society.

CAIR officials have requested that Mr. Conyers ask the Justice Department to explain why it publicly identified the 306 co-conspirators in the Holy Land Foundation trial.

"Those on the list suffer negatively as a result of the label 'unindicted co-conspirator' as it impresses upon the typical member of the American public that those listed are involved in criminal activity," the group said in a letter to Mr. Conyers. "In reality, those so named have neither been charged with a crime nor offered any recourse for challenging the allegation."

The group said the conspirator designation is being used by counterterrorism advocates to block government funds from being used to conduct outreach programs to Muslim groups. Pending fiscal 2008 legislation would block the Justice Department from using any funds for participation in conferences sponsored by a group or person identified by the government as a criminal unindicted co-conspirator. Critics in Congress opposed the Justice Department's involvement in a conference sponsored by ISNA in September because the group was linked to the Holy Land Foundation case.

CAIR's letter to Mr. Conyers said that "you remember many of these abusive practices from the McCarthy era and the civil rights movement."

Melanie Roussell, a spokeswoman for the Judiciary Committee, had no comment.

CAIR recently petitioned U.S. District Court Chief Judge A. Joe Fish in a "friend of the court" motion to remove it from the listing, saying it caused a decline in membership and fundraising. After the mistrial, Judge Fish forwarded CAIR's request to U.S. Judge Jorge A. Solis, who has not yet issued a ruling. The group stated in its appeal that linkage to the Holy Land Foundation has "impeded its ability to collect donations" because donors fear contributing to a terrorist group.

Steven Emerson, executive director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism, said the secret collaboration between CAIR and Mr. Conyers raises concerns over the lawmaker's support for "a group unambiguously proven to be part of the Muslim Brotherhood-Hamas infrastructure."

"This combination demonstrates the degree to which radical Islamic groups have insinuated themselves into the highest reaches of the U.S. government by using deceit," he said.

A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment, citing a gag order issued in the case.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), has petitioned a court to have the label of "un-indicted co-conspirator" removed. CAIR, among many other Islamist groups, was labeled an un-indicted co-conspirator in the recent Holy Land Foundation (HLF) trial held in Texas.

CAIR wrote to House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers asking for help in pressuring the Justice Department to remove the designation. CAIR is also asking why the Justice Department publicly named all 306 co-conspirators in the HLF indictment.

CAIR, the nation's premier apologist for Islamist terror and Islamist terrorists, is upset because the government made the very obvious connection between CAIR and terrorism.

The only mystery here is why it took the government so long to acknowledge what has been common knowledge for many years.

CAIR goes on to complain that the designation of un-indicted co-conspirator interferes with its ability to qualify for government funds for outreach programs as pending 2008 legislation would block the Justice Department from providing funds to any group or person identified as a criminal un-indicted co-conspirator.

Imagine that! It will take a federal law to implement common sense - that the government should not be providing money to a criminal un-indicted co-conspirator. Is this to mean that current law allows the Justice Department to provide funds to such groups or persons?

CAIR's letter to Conyers alluded to a civil rights connection by saying, ".you remember many of these abusive practices from the McCarthy era and the civil rights movement."

CAIR, once again, attempts to tie Muslims into the America's Civil Rights era, completely overlooking the fact that Muslims in America come in all colors and that the Civil Rights era was a justified struggle by black Americans for civil rights. Is CAIR being disingenuous by preying on Congressman Conyers African-American Ancestry?

While it may be too soon to figure out what Representative Conyers will do on behalf of CAIR, perhaps he will listen to the words of Sue Myrick, Representative of North Carolina, when she responded to some questions put to her by noted author Paul Sperry in the on-line edition of Investor's Business Daily:

(Note: Rep. Myrick is founder of the House Anti-Terrorism/Jihad Caucus, a group made up of 118 Democrat and Republican Representatives)

IBD: What persuaded you to start the Anti-Terrorism/Jihad Caucus, and what do you hope to accomplish?

Myrick: I decided to start the caucus out of a deep frustration, because President Bush does not talk to the American people about the long-term threat of radical Islamofascism infiltration in America. Since 9/11, I've tried to get the president and several members of his administration to talk to the American people about the dangerous enemy that we're facing.

IBD: Are there any Muslim groups with which federal or other government officials - as well as businesses and nonprofits - should think twice about doing outreach or interfaith activities?

Myrick: I know of some Muslim nongovernmental organizations that are doing good things, such as the Islamic Supreme Council of America, the American Islamic Congress and the American Islamic Forum for Democracy.However, groups such as Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and others have a proven record of senior officials being indicted and either imprisoned or deported from the U.S. Just to name a few: Ghassan Elashi, a founding board member of CAIR, is serving 80 months in prison; Randall "Ismail" Royer, the communications director for CAIR, is serving 20 years in prison; and Bassam Khafagi, the director of CAIR's community relations, has been arrested and deported.

There was a lot of evidence presented at the recent Holy Land Foundation trial, which exposed CAIR, ISNA and others as front groups for the Muslim Brotherhood.

What does Myrick know that Conyers may not?

Let's hope that Myrick makes the time to bring Conyers up to speed about CAIR and CAIR's ties to Islamist terrorists and terrorist groups.

Congressman Conyers should do the right thing and place CAIR's letter where it belongs, in the trash can. CAIR is not deserving of a response from a member of the People's Congress on stationary paid for by the people.

We're sure we speak for the majority of Americans when we say we look forward to the day when the "un" is removed from CAIR's well-deserved title of "un-indicted criminal co-conspirator".

By NEIL MacFARQUHARPublished: November 28, 2007MINNEAPOLIS — Sometimes when Asma Haidara, a 12-year-old Somali immigrant, wants to shop at Target or ride the Minneapolis light-rail system, she puts her Girl Scout sash over her everyday clothes, which usually include a long skirt worn over pants as well as a swirling head scarf.

Girls from predominantly Muslim Troop 3119 in Minneapolis at an indoor cookout on a rainy day. She has discovered that the trademark green sash — with its American flag, troop number (3009) and colorful merit badges — reduces the number of glowering looks she draws from people otherwise bothered by her traditional Muslim dress.

“When you say you are a girl scout, they say, ‘Oh, my daughter is a girl scout, too,’ and then they don’t think of you as a person from another planet,” said Asma, a slight, serious girl with a bright smile. “They are more comfortable about sitting next to me on the train.”

Scattered Muslim communities across the United States are forming Girl Scout troops as a sort of assimilation tool to help girls who often feel alienated from the mainstream culture, and to give Muslims a neighborly aura. Boy Scout troops are organized with the same inspiration, but often the leap for girls is greater because many come from conservative cultures that frown upon their participating in public physical activity.

By teaching girls to roast hot dogs or fix a flat bicycle tire, Farheen Hakeem, one troop leader here, strives to help them escape the perception of many non-Muslims that they are different.

Scouting is a way of celebrating being American without being any less Muslim, Ms. Hakeem said.

“I don’t want them to see themselves as Muslim girls doing this ‘Look at us, we are trying to be American,’ ” she said. “No, no, no, they are American. It is not an issue of trying.”

The exact number of Muslim girl scouts is unknown, especially since, organizers say, most Muslim scouts belong to predominantly non-Muslim troops. Minneapolis is something of an exception, because a few years ago the Girl Scout Council here surveyed its shrinking enrollment and established special outreach coordinators for various minorities. Some 280 Muslim girls have joined about 10 predominantly Muslim troops here, said Hodan Farah, who until September was the Scout coordinator for the Islamic community.

Nationally, the Boy Scouts of America count about 1,500 youths in 100 clubs of either Boy Scouts or Cub Scouts sponsored by Islamic organizations, said Gregg Shields, a spokesman for the organization.

The Girl Scouts’ national organization, Girl Scouts of the U.S.A., has become flexible in recent years about the old trappings associated with suburban, white, middle-class Christian scouting. Many troops have done away with traditions like saying grace before dinner at camp, and even the Girl Scout Promise can be retooled as needed.

“On my honor I will try to serve Allah and my country, to help people and live by the Girl Scout law,” eight girls from predominantly Muslim Troop 3119 in Minneapolis recited on one recent rainy Sunday before setting off for a cookout in a local park.

Some differences were readily apparent, of course. At the cookout, Ms. Hakeem, a former Green Party candidate for mayor, negotiated briefly with one sixth grader, Asha Gardaad, who was fasting for the holy month of Ramadan.

The troop leader distributed supplies: hot dogs followed by s’mores for dessert. All was halal — that is, in adherence with the dietary requirements of Islamic law — with the hot dogs made of beef rather than pork.

It was Asha’s first s’more. “It’s delicious!” she exclaimed, licking sticky goop off her fingers as thunder crashed outside the park shelter with its roaring fire. “It’s a good way to break my fast!”

Women trying to organize Girl Scout troops in Muslim communities often face resistance from parents, particularly immigrants from an Islamic culture like that of Somalia, where tradition dictates that girls do housework after school.

In Nashville, where Ellisha King of Catholic Charities helps run a Girl Scout troop on a shoestring to assist Somali children with acculturation, most parents vetoed a camping trip, for example. They figured years spent as refugees in tents was enough camping, Ms. King recalled.

But a more common concern among parents is that the Girl Scouts will somehow dilute Islamic traditions.

1 2 ===============To Muslim Girls, Scouts Offer a Chance to Fit In

Published: November 28, 2007(Page 2 of 2)

“They are afraid you are going to become a blue-eyed, blond-haired Barbie doll,” said Asma, the girl who at times makes her sash everyday attire. Asma noted that her mother had asked whether she was joining some Christian cabal. “She was afraid that if we hang out with Americans too much,” the young immigrant said, “it will change our culture or who we are.”

Farheen Hakeem, troop leader, led girls in the reciting of the Girl Scout Promise. Troop leaders win over parents by explaining that various activities incorporate Muslim traditions. In Minneapolis, for instance, Ms. Hakeem helped develop the Khadija Club, named for the first wife of the Prophet Muhammad, which exposes older girls to the history of prominent Muslim women.

Suboohi Khan, 10, won her Bismallah (in the name of God) ribbon by writing 4 of God’s 99 names in Arabic calligraphy and decorating them, as well as memorizing the Koran’s last verse, used for protection against gossips and goblins. Otherwise, she said, her favorite badge involved learning “how to make body glitter and to see which colors look good on us” and “how to clean up our nails.”

Girl Scouts of the U.S.A. does not issue religious badges, but endorses those established by independent groups. Gulafshan K. Alavi started one such group, the Islamic Committee on Girl Scouting, in Stamford, Conn., in 1990. The demand for information about Muslim badges, Mrs. Alavi said, has grown to the point where this year she had the pamphlet listing her club’s requirements printed rather than sending out a photocopied flier. She also shipped up to 400 patches awarded to girls who study Ramadan traditions, she said, the most ever.

Predominantly Muslim troops do accept non-Muslim members. In Minneapolis, Alexis Eastlund, 10, said other friends sometimes pestered her about belonging to a mostly Muslim troop, although she has known many of its members half her life.

“I never really thought of them as different,” Alexis said. “But other girls think that it is weird that I am Christian and hang out with a bunch of Muslim girls. I explain to them that they are the same except they have to wear a hijab on their heads.”

Ms. Farah, who served as an outreach coordinator in Minneapolis and remains active in the Scouts, said she used the organization as a platform to try to ease tensions in the community. Scraps between African-American and Somali girls prompted her to start a research project demonstrating to them that their ancestors all came from roughly the same place.

Ms. Hakeem, the troop leader, said she tried to find projects to improve the girls’ self-esteem, like going through the Eddie Bauer catalog to cut out long skirts and other items that adhere to Islamic dress codes.

All in all, scouting gives the girls a rare sense of belonging, troop leaders and members say.

“It is kind of cool to say that you are a girl scout,” Asma said. “It is good to have something to associate yourself with other Americans. I don’t want people to think that I am a hermit, that I live in a cave, isolated and afraid of change. I like to be part of society. I like being able to say that I am a girl scout just like any other normal girl.”

Last week, I visited a Muslim place of worship. A schedule for Islam's five daily prayers was posted at the entrance, near a sign requesting that shoes be removed. Inside, a barrier divided men's and women's prayer space, an arrow informed worshippers of the direction of Mecca, and literature urged women to cover their faces.Sound like a mosque? The place I'm describing is the "meditation room" at Normandale Community College, a 9,200-student public institution in Bloomington.

Until recently, the room was the school's only usable racquetball court. College administrators converted the court into a meditation room when construction forced closure of the previous meditation room.A row of chest-high barriers splits the room into sex-segregated sections. In the smaller, enclosed area for women sits a pile of shawls and head-coverings. Literature titled "Hijaab [covering] and Modesty" was prominently placed there, instructing women on proper Islamic behavior. They should cover their faces and stay at home, it said, and their speech should not "be such that it is heard." "Enter into Islaam completely and accept all the rulings of Islaam," the tract read in part. "It should not be that you accept what entertains your desires and leave what opposes your desires; this is from the manners of the Jews.""[T]he Jews and the Christians" are described as "the enemies of Allaah's religion." The document adds: "Remember that you will never succeed while you follow these people."A poster on the room's door advertised a local lecture on "marriage from an Islamic perspective," with "useful tips for marital harmony from the Prophet's ... life." Other fliers invited students to join the Normandale Islamic Forum, or participate in Ramadan celebrations.One thing was missing from the meditation room: evidence of any faith but Islam. No Bible, no crucifix, no Torah.

Normandale's administration is facilitating the room's Islamization. The college's building crew erected the barrier separating men's and women's sections, according to Ralph Anderson, dean of student affairs. College officials also posted signs at the room's entrance asking students to remove shoes -- a Muslim custom before prayers. This was "basically a courtesy to Muslim students," Anderson said.

Despite the room's Islamic atmosphere, Anderson says it "is open to everyone."

Why is the meditation room segregated by sex? "Muslim students prefer that areas be divided into male and female," he said. "Other students don't care."Doesn't sex-segregation present a constitutional problem in a public educational institution? "I don't want to comment on that," he said.And the literature regarding Jews and Christians? "I would probably take it out if I knew it was in there," said Anderson. Normandale's zealous effort to accommodate Muslim students is not new. Chad Lunaas, a former student who works at the college part time, cites examples.Last year on Fridays, he says, he often entered the bathroom to find that "every sink and toilet stall had someone washing his feet." Other students couldn't use the bathroom at these times, and those who tried felt awkward. Lunaas finally expressed his concerns to a Muslim student who "seemed to be in charge.""His attitude was, 'We don't have to listen to you, we can do whatever we want,' " he said.Confrontations also erupted in the sex-segregated meditation room, according to Lunaas. "Muslim students just took it over. They made people who were not of the Muslim religion feel very uncomfortable, especially if they were female." One female student tried to use the room when Muslim students were in it, said Lunaas. "She believed she should be treated equally. They were telling her to leave, to take off her shoes, to go to the other side of the divider."Anderson says he met several times with concerned students. But "the whole thing was just basically swept aside," according to Lunaas. Anderson said that in the incident involving the young woman, "both sides were probably out of line."Howard Odor, who advises the college's Somali Student Association, said he has not been aware of "any issues" since the meditation room has been in the racquetball court. "I can guarantee that college policy is that anyone who wants to go in there and pray or meditate can do so." But many at the college see a bigger issue."For all practical purposes, this meditation room is essentially a Muslim prayer room," said Chuck Chalberg of Normandale's history faculty. "Something this unprecedented goes beyond religious toleration."

January 1, 2008 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - Kenny Gamble is best known for being "the architect of the Philly Soul Sound." His catalog of hits includes "Me and Mrs. Jones" and he and longtime collaborator Leon Huff are slated to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame next year. But Gamble is also the architect of a planned stealth Islamist enclave in Philadelphia where he is better known in Muslim circles as Brother Luqman Abdul Haqq.

Gamble has admitted that he intends to bring about the Muslim community in South Philadelphia through his "Universal Companies" and proclaims that his state and federally subsidized funded building endeavors are part of an Islamist blueprint, "We are not down here just for Universal-we are down here for Islam." In 1975 after a personal crisis Gamble converted to Islam and took the name of Luqman Abdul Haqq. Founding an organization called "The United Muslim Movement," he opened a masjid of the same name. In 1993 he formed the "Universal Companies" specializing in urban revitalization projects. Both UMM and UC's mission statements are virtually identical.

Recently the United Muslim Masjid which Gamble founded and built "hosted" a conference call from Jamil Al Amin, the former H. Rap Brown, now serving a life sentence for murdering a police officer:

"...A highlight of one meeting, for example, was when we had Imam Jamil Al-Amin on speaker phone talking to us from his Georgia prison. MANA and its members have raised and donated several thousands of dollars to his family and legal defense team. Imam Jamil has recently been transferred to a "supermax" prison in Colorado, and we ask that you make du'a for him." [source, http://www.mana-net.org/pages.php?ID=&NUM=164]Gamble is also a member of the Majlis Ash Shura Council of MANA, the Muslim Alliance in North America, which is led by Siraj Wahhaj. MANA was created to support cop killer Al Amin. Siraj Wahhaj is perhaps most infamous as having been named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 by Federal prosecutor Mary Jo White.

"The catalyst for the founding of MANA was the arrest of Imam Jamil in March, 2000. Imam Jamil's arrest placed Al-Ummah (Imam Jamil?s organization) under intense pressure. In April, 2000 the leadership of Al-Ummah met in Philadelphia and decided that they needed to expand the base of the organization and to get more people involved to help in the efforts to free Imam Jamil and in the efforts of dawah and other Islamic work...On April 21 an executive committee was elected, which included: Imam Siraj and Imam Talib, in addition to Luqman Abdul Haqq, Asim Abdur Rashid, Amir al-Islam, Ihsan Bagby, Zaid Shakir and Hamza Yusuf…We ask Allah (SWT) to increase the good efforts of Universal Companies, United Muslim Movement, MANA, and others committed to helping our people, our communities and society-at-large." [source, http://www.wrmea.com/archives/july01/0107082.html]It's hard to imagine how such a problematic proposal has gone this far without intense public scrutiny. Aside from considering the wisdom of creating what might amount to a little Somalia in a major urban center, there are the obvious questions regarding government funding - under the transparent guise of urban renewal - of what is clearly a hard-core Muslim da'wa [faith spreading] program.

Everything about Gamble's stealth plan for a government subsidized Muslim ghetto - "one of the best kept secrets of Muslim America" - suggests a need for concern; indeed one wonders if Pennsylvania taxpayers are even aware that their tax dollars are going to help Gamble's plans to build "jihad central" while calling it "a neighborhood transformation initiative," a so-far effective strategy, having garnered $1.6 billion in government and private grants and funding.

Now that the secret is out, it's time that Pennsylvanians move to stop Gamble's participation in this project. His motives are self-serving, thoroughly inconsistent with the concept of the American melting pot and obliterate the separation between church and state.

"The termination of Stephen Coughlin on the Joint Staff is an act of intellectual cowardice"

LTC Joseph C. Myers, Army Advisor to the Air Command and Staff College, speaks out about the firing of Stephen Coughlin:

MAJ (USAR) Stephen Coughlin is to my knowledge the only Islamic Law scholar on the Joint Staff...He is a lawyer by training and a reserve Military Intelligence Officer. His first interface with Islamic Law began in Pakistan where he was investigating and prosecuting an intellectual property rights case about 10 years ago. Reviewing Pakistani property rights law, he kept seeing footnoted references to the Quran and sharia law...

I have long argued and wondered why our military from senior leaders down to tactical level are so unread and unstudied on Islam, jihad in Islam, even the topic of terrorism. I have often contrasted this unconscionable wartime state of affairs, with the due diligence the US military showed since I was a cadet at West Point 30 years ago, where we lived, ate, slept and drank Soviet warfighting doctrine...it was the threat we oriented on and we developed our own doctrine around -- "AirLand Battle" in the early 1980's.

Can anyone show me where the equivalent of the Soviet threat doctrine series for the global war on terror is published?

It has not been done.

Yet today we are in the process of prosecuting war, that from doctrinal perspective, we fundamentally do not understand. Over two years I have had 90 of the Army's top majors come through ACSC, across all branches including MI and special operations forces, and only one had read a book with the title Understanding Terror Networks, that by Marc Sageman...

Just before Christmas I presented a lecture on Understanding Terrorist and Insurgent Support Systems to an interagency audience at the Joint Special Operations University, that included Joint Staff and Joint Command officers, DIA and other IC reps, DHS and law enforcement... there, two people had read Sageman's work...two out of the special ops community. The third individual was Sageman himself.

More importantly we have not studied Islamic Law and few have seen or heard of even the English translation of it that has been in print for years, none had at JSOU or had read a work titled Understanding Jihad, War and Peace in the Law of Islam or even The Quranic Concept of War...I can go on but let me be frank.

This failure of intellectual preparation is a leadership failure, and it is as the 9-11 Commission warned, a failure of vision.

We have spent much intellectual capitol revamping and analyzing our own doctrine as it relates to counterinsurgency...it's time we do our homework on the threat.

Coughlin has briefed senior Marine Corps leaders and staff and has presented his thesis in various military educational venues...by all accounts the veil of ignorance is lifted for all but only a few who are afraid to face what Islamic Law, doctrinal Islam, says and means with respect to jihad and how it plays out across the Islamic world from al Qaida, to the Saudi government, to Pakistan to the Muslim Brotherhood...

What Coughlin did was provide the epiphany in his over 300-page Joint Military Intelligence College thesis titled, "To Our Great Detriment: Ignoring What Extremists Say About Jihad" that is meticulously documented and powerfully argued.

In short, he argues we have in fact intellectually pre-empted our military decision making process and intelligence preparation of the battlefield process, the critical step 3-"evaluate the threat." Strategically we have failed to do that by substituting policy for military analysis, for substituting cliché for competent decision processes.

We began on September 12, 2001 with "Islam is a religion of peace," which soothed ideological sentiments of many but has failed us strategically, short-stopped the objective, sytstemic evaluation of the threat doctrine.

"Islam is a religion of peace" is fine for public policy statements, but is not and cannot be the point of departure for competent military or intelligence analysis...it is in fact a logical flaw under any professional research methodology...you have stated the conclusion before you have done the analysis.

If one has studied the implication of the Holy Land Foundation trial discovery documents as I have, as a former DIA senior military analyst, and understanding as even Bill Gertz has written in his book Enemies about the dismal record of our counter-intelligence one has to wonder and question the extent we are in fact penetrated in government and academia by foreign agents of influence, the Muslim Brotherhood, Islamists and those who truly in essence do not share our social compact.

The termination of Stephen Coughlin on the Joint Staff is an act of intellectual cowardice.

We can only hope he can be positioned in his next venue to continue to educate our military for the fight we are in -- if we don't understand the war and the enemy we are engaged against we remain vulnerable and we cannot win.

The Iowa Legislature started just over a week ago and some people were upset before the first issue was every addressed. When the session began, a Muslim Imam began the prayer in the Iowa Legislature. This is where the controversy begins. The prayer asked of "Victory over those who disbelieve," and "Protection from the great Satan" among other things. Pastor Steve Smith of the Evangelical Free Church in Albert City is among those concerned about the Muslim prayer. Rev. Smith admits that he doesn't know about all the levels of Muslim but knows that the Jihadists believe those in the U.S. are the great Satan. Rev. Smith also wants to point out the mention of "victory over those who disbelieve." He feels "this is a request in the Iowa Legislature for God to grant the Muslims victory over every non-muslim. Not a request for salvation." Smith takes it as a gesture not of prayer but more as a political statement, especially with the wars that have been going on in the Middle East. "I'm not concerned about a Muslim Imam opening the Legislature in prayer but it concerns me with the statements that were made. He interpreted this prayer from his understanding of Islam."

Here is the text of the opening prayer, as transcribed by Radio Iowa: Imam Muhammad Khan of the Islamic Center of Des Moines spoke first in Arabic. "I seek refuge in God against the accursed Satan in the name of God, most gracious, most merciful," Khan said in English. Khan made no specific mention of the war in Iraq or foreign affairs, but he called God the "master of the day of judgment" and asked for "victory over those who disbelieve." "As we begin this new year...in a world with trials and tribulations, we ask you to open the hearts of our legislators and policy makers to make the right decisions for the people of Iowa," Khan said. "...We ask that you guide our legislators and give them the wisdom and knowledge to tackle the difficult problems that face us today in order to eliminate the senseless crimes on humanity. Help them, Lord, to solve the complicated problems in the State of Iowa so that we can be a model to the world." Khan's prayer lasted about four minutes and he closed with a few words for legislators. "On behalf of the Muslim community of Des Moines and Iowa, I wish you all the success in this year for making the right decisions for us," Khan said. Khan was the guest of State Representative Ako Abdul Samad of Des Moines, who is also a local Muslim leader. Rev. Smith has urged others who may be concerned to contact their representative. When asked about the prayer, Senator Steve Kettering replied in an e-mail that he had not heard the prayer, which did not take place in the Senate chambers. "I cannot tell you what was said. I have received e-mail regarding this, but since it did not occur on the Senate side I do not have much information," Kettering said. " I should point out that the senate had a Catholic priest for their opening." Representative Gary Worthan of Storm Lake said that he agrees with the concern being shown over the Muslim prayer. He said that he has registered his concerns with the proper authorities. As the father of two sons who have fought terrorism in the military, Worthan said the phrases mentioned earlier also jumped out at him and he said he shares concern for the same reasons as the constituents he is hearing from.

TORONTO - A Toronto-area man has been posting messages on the Internet supporting attacks against Canadian soldiers on Canadian soil, drawing the attention of RCMP national security investigators.Police have advised the Bangladeshi-Canadian that he is under investigation for incitement and facilitating terrorism after he repeatedly called the killing of Canadian troops in Canada "legitimate" and "well deserved."No charges have been laid, but counterterrorism officers are apparently taking it seriously, and the case has set off a debate inside government over where to draw the line between free expression and incitement."The promotion of hate and violence has no place in Canadian society, and it is an offence under the Criminal Code," Stockwell Day, the Minister of Public Safety, responded when shown a sample of the postings. "Our government carefully balances the right to freedom of expression with our duty to protect Canadians from harm."

Alarm bells about the online writings went off last September after German authorities arrested three Islamic militants accused of planning to bomb the Ramstein Air Base and Frankfurt International Airport.That same day, Salman Hossain posted several messages about the plot on the comment board of a Toronto-based Internet site where he is a frequent contributor.Although Mr. Hossain claimed in one of his communications with the National Post that he made the comments in a private online chat room, the messages can easily be viewed by anyone using a simple Google search."I hope the German brothers were gonna blow up US-German bases in their country. We should do that here in Canada as well. Kill as many western soldiers as well so that they think twice before entering foreign countries on behalf of their Jew masters," he wrote."Any and all Western soldiers getting prepared to enter Muslim nations like Afghanistan or Iraq should be legitimate targets by any and all Islamic militants either in the attacked nations or in the western nations --if there were any planned attacks against Canadian/ American soldiers by 'Muslim militants' in Canadian soil, I'd support it," he added.

"Canadian soldiers in Canadian soil who are training to go to Afghanistan or Iraq are legitimate targets to be killed. … Now it is POSSIBLE AND LEGITIMATE!! ... believe me, if we could have enough of our soldiers killed, then we'd be forced to withdrawn from Afghanistan."In addition, he singles out Jews, writing: "When do I get to shoot a few Jews down for attempting to blow up dozens of mosques in America right after 9-11 … why f---ing target the Americans when the Jews are better?"

The author of the messages is a Mississauga university student in his mid-twenties who claims to know the infamous Khadr family and several of the men arrested in Toronto in June, 2006, on terrorism conspiracy charges. He confirmed to the National Post that he was the author of the postings but later declined to comment further on the advice of his lawyer. While he writes that he approves of attacking Canadian troops, he also says he would not do so himself.

Despite being visited by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and RCMP and told he was under investigation, Mr. Hossain has continued to post messages approving of attacks on Canadian troops.Saying anti-war protests "will do sh$$," he describes a "mass casualty" attack on the home-front as "a well considered option" and "the best way to compel western soldiers to get out of Afghanistan/Iraq."Such an attack "would be fantastic and would get the job done," he writes. "If someone gets the bright idea of committing such a wonderful act, it's NOT my responsibility in any way, shape or form."He wrote, "I enjoy watching the blood flow from the western troops," and during Defence Minister Peter MacKay's Christmas week visit to Kandahar, he wrote: "I pray that the Taliban kill our Mackay motherf---er."In other postings, he wishes "a merry 9-11, and I wish y'all many more merry 9-11s"; says "the Jews are literally the most treacherous nation on the face of the Earth"; says "I hate the Jews"; and claims "the filthy Jews carried out 9-11."

He rails at police, saying "you can't charge me for possessing a thought" and writes that he "honestly got a kick outta pissing off the RCMP … HAHAHA … i was laughing my ass off for provoking the RCMP."The case comes as Canadian security agencies are struggling to deal with extremism among a minority of Muslim Canadians, particularly youths. Intelligence analysts believe much of this radicalization is occurring on the Internet."So what we are in the presence of is a ranter, informed by the usual conspiratorial views that are unfortunately part and parcel of extremist Islamist thought -- especially the core anti-Semitic notion of a giant Jewish conspiracy," said Professor Wesley Wark, a Canadian security expert.

But he said while the language is violent and crude, it is probably harmless venting. "On the other hand, there is always a worry that such speech could tip over into action by this person or others of like mind."The RCMP would not comment on the probe, saying sensitive matters of national security were involved, but spokeswoman Corporal Cathy McCrory said the government was "committed to ensuring the safety and security of citizens and we will not tolerate those that seek to harm Canadians."Canada's Anti-Terrorism Act (ATA) does not specifically outlaw incitement of terrorism, although such a measure has been discussed by MPs.Prof. Work, visiting research professor at the University of Ottawa School of Public and International Affair, said a debate on the topic is needed."It's high time we had a proper public airing of the pros and cons of further reforms to the ATA, including an incitement clause, and a public airing of the nature of legal powers needed to ensure prompt and effective monitoring of potentially harmful Internet traffic."A few days after Mr. Hossain wrote that "we should do" a Ramstein-type plot in Canada, the RCMP contacted him. He spoke to them on Sept. 18 at his lawyer's office.

He later posted messages saying he was under police investigation, but he said that "cheerleading" for Muslim insurgents in Afghanistan "is every Muslim's right."Although he did not tone down his rhetoric, he did make one change: His comments are now sometimes followed by a disclaimer that says he is not inciting violence but merely "suggesting" scenarios and he is not responsible if they actually happen."I don't see how the right to free speech includes deliberateincitement to violence," said Bruce Hoffman, a Georgetown University professor and a leading international expert on terrorism, after reading the postings."One would think that [Canadian soldiers] are owed more than, 'Well, I don't think we can secure a conviction.' How demoralizing is it for soldiers to find out that people are openly advocating terrorism against them and yet the government who they serve won't do anything about it because it's either too much trouble or there's no guarantee they're going to succeed?"

Prof. Hoffman said the postings remind him of the material that incited Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. "Reading those, I was wondering, is there any Western country that would tolerate people posting things talking about staging attacks like this?"He said that while there was no guarantee a criminal case would succeed, prosecutors might want to go ahead anyway, if only to send a message that "you can't openly advocate the murder of Canadian soldiers.Four months after he met RCMP officers at his lawyer's office, the Mississauga man continues to make provocative postings. On Jan. 17, he wrote that, "If the Taliban had the capability to attack our troops in our own soil, which I personally hope they do in the future, then these pussies will be dead scared of sending any more troops in2 Afghanistan."sbell@nationalpost.com__________________

Complaint Filed Against Three Men of Columbia, Tennessee for Vandalizing Islamic CenterNewswire

WASHINGTON, Feb 12, 2008 PRNewswire-USNewswire via COMTEX/ -- A federal felony criminal complaint was filed in Nashville, Tenn., today against three men for their roles in burning down and vandalizing the Islamic Center of Columbia in Columbia, Tenn., announced Grace Chung Becker, Acting Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division, Edward M. Yarbrough, U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Tennessee, James M. Cavanaugh, Special Agent in Charge of the Nashville Division of the ATF, My Harrison, Special Agent in Charge of the Memphis Division of the FBI, and Barry Crotzner, Chief of the Columbia Police Department.

The complaint charges the three men, Eric Ian Baker, Michael Corey Golden, and Jonathan Edward Stone, all of Columbia, with unlawful possession of a destructive device.

According to the complaint, Baker, Golden and Stone had planned for approximately one week to burn down the Islamic Center. On Feb. 9, 2008, the defendants used gasoline, rags and empty beer bottles to fashion incendiary devices. They went to the Islamic Center, where Baker spray-painted three swastikas onto the walls of the building, along with the phrases "We run the world" and "White Power." Golden and Stone then broke into the building, ignited the incendiary devices and used them to ignite the Islamic Center. The Islamic Center was severely damaged by the fire.

"The Department of Justice takes hate crimes very seriously, and the U.S. Attorney's Office will prosecute such crimes vigorously and to the fullest extent of the law," said U.S. Attorney Yarbrough.

"Three individuals who are accused of fire bombing a place of worship face federal charges today. Today begins a court process to hold the individuals accountable for an act which destroyed religious property and shocked a community," said Special Agent Cavanaugh. "We are fortunate despite the loss of property and a sense of sadness, that no one was killed or injured from the incident."

If convicted, defendants Baker, Golden and Stone face a maximum sentence of 10 years and a fine of up to $250,000.

A federal felony criminal complaint is merely an accusation and the defendants are presumed innocent unless proven guilty.

This case remains under investigation by the ATF, the FBI and the Columbia Police Department. The case is being prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Hal McDonough of the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Middle District of Tennessee and Trial Attorney Jonathan Skrmetti of the Criminal Section of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division.

http://www.cbc.ca/story/canada/national/2006/06/08/amiruddin08062006.htmlTeacher witnessed transformation of some bomb-plot suspectsLast Updated Thu, 08 Jun 2006 18:06:10 EDTCBC NewsA Muslim religious leader in Toronto who knows some of those charged in the suspected bomb plot says the young men underwent rapid transformations from normal Canadian teenagers to radicalized introverts.

Alleged bomb-plot suspects in a Brampton courtroom on Tuesday. (John Mantha/CBC)Sayyid Ahmed Amiruddin got to know Saad Khalid, 19, and some of the other alleged conspirators at a local mosque.

Khalid was arrested last Friday at a warehouse, where he and another suspect allegedly took delivery of what they thought was ammonium nitrate, a fertilizer, and the same substance used in the deadly Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.

Fifteen others are also facing charges connected to the alleged plot.

Entered mosque to pray

Amiruddin says Khalid used to come to his mosque to pray, sometimes in the company of Zakaria Amara and Fahim Ahmad, two of the alleged ringleaders.

"They would enter into the mosque to pray, and they would pray in a very aggressive manner, and they would come in military fatigues and military touques and stuff. It looked to me that they were watching a lot of those Chechnyan jihad videos online and stuff."

Amiruddin is a teacher of Sufism, a traditional brand of Islam that rejects the ideology of jihad. Amiruddin says the group was seduced by hardline propaganda financed by the Saudi government and promoting a strict, Wahhabi brand of Islam.

He says the Saudis have flooded Canada with free Qur'ans, laced with jihadist commentary.

"In the back of these Qur'ans that are being published in Saudi Arabia, you have basically essays on the need for offensive jihad and the legitimacy of offensive jihad and things like that. Very alarming stuff," he said.

Amiruddin said many mainstream Muslim organizations in Canada are really part of the problem, standing by as extremist propaganda spreads in the mosques.

He cites the Al-Rahman centre in Mississauga, Ont., which he links to the Al-Maghrib Institute, which runs a popular educational website. It's nominally run out of Ottawa, but Amiruddin says it's really a Saudi operation.

Recruiting young teens

Amiruddin says Khalid underwent a rapid transition from a clean-cut Canadian teenager to a long-haired, radicalized introvert.

He says the young men would pray by themselves, and try to recruit younger teens to the fundamentalist Wahhabi view.

Amiruddin says Khalid stopped coming to the mosque after he befriended 43-year-old Qayyum Abdul Jamal, another key suspect, who once preached that Canadian forces were in Afghanistan to rape Muslim women.

Amiruddin also has a theory as to why Khalid may have been open to such influences.

"His mother passed away and let's say within the first month of his mom passing away, his girlfriend, who was not Muslim, dumped him. And then from that within a year you have this radical turnaround right? Even Fahim Ahmad, he was in love with a girl who constantly rejected him, right? Maybe he was just looking for love? I can't say for certain, but this was something I found common with these young guys."

This is exactly the sort of subject where the NYT can be at its most disingenuous, but we search for Truth, so caveat lector.======================

SAN JOSE — Amir Mertaban vividly recalls sitting at his university’s recruitment table for the Muslim Students Association a few years ago when an attractive undergraduate flounced up in a decidedly un-Islamic miniskirt, saying “Salamu aleykum,” or “Peace be upon you,” a standard Arabic greeting, and asked to sign up.

Amir Mertaban has pointed out that hypocrisy can factor into some conservative responses by association members. Mr. Mertaban also recalls that his fellow recruiter surveyed the young woman with disdain, arguing later that she should not be admitted because her skirt clearly signaled that she would corrupt the Islamic values of the other members.

“I knew that brother, I knew him very well; he used to smoke weed on a regular basis,” said Mr. Mertaban, now 25, who was president of the Muslim student group at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, from 2003 to 2005.

Pointing out the hypocrisy, Mr. Mertaban won the argument that the group could no longer reject potential members based on rigid standards of Islamic practice.

The intense debate over whether organizations for Muslim students should be inclusive or strict is playing out on college campuses across the United States, where there are now more than 200 Muslim Students Association chapters.

Gender issues, specifically the extent to which men and women should mingle, are the most fraught topic as Muslim students wrestle with the yawning gap between American college traditions and those of Islam.

“There is this constant tension between becoming a mainstream student organization versus appealing to students who have a more conservative or stricter interpretation of Islam,” said Hadia Mubarak, the first woman to serve as president of the national association, from 2004 to 2005.

Each chapter enjoys relative autonomy in setting its rules. Broadly, those at private colleges tend to be more liberal because they draw from a more geographically dispersed population, and the smaller numbers prompt Muslim students to play down their differences.

Chapters at state colleges, on the other hand, often pull from the community, attracting students from conservative families who do not want their children too far afield.

At Yale, for example, Sunnis and Shiites mix easily and male and female students shocked parents in the audience by kissing during the annual awards ceremony. Contrast that with the University of California, Irvine, which has the reputation for being the most conservative chapter in the country, its president saying that to an outsider its ranks of bearded young men and veiled women might come across as “way Muslim” or even extremist.

But arguments erupt virtually everywhere. At the University of California, Davis, last year, in their effort to make the Muslim association more “cool,” board members organized a large alcohol-free barbecue. Men and women ate separately, but mingled in a mock jail for a charity drive.

The next day the chapter president, Khalida Fazel, said she fielded complaints that unmarried men and women were physically bumping into one other. Ms. Fazel now calls the event a mistake.

At George Washington University, a dodge ball game pitting men against women after Friday prayers drew such protests from Muslim alumni and a few members that the board felt compelled to seek a religious ruling stating that Islamic traditions accept such an event.

Members acknowledge that the tone of the Muslim associations often drives away students. Several presidents said that if they thought members were being too lax, guest imams would deliver prayer sermons about the evils of alcohol or premarital sex.

Judgment can also come swiftly. Ghayth Adhami, a graduate of the University of California, Los Angeles, recalled how a young student who showed up at a university recruitment meeting in a Budweiser T-shirt faced a few comments about un-Islamic dress. The student never came back.

Some members push against the rigidity. Fatima Hassan, 22, a senior at the Davis campus, organized a coed road trip to Reno, Nev., two hours away, to play the slot machines last Halloween. In Islam, Ms. Hassan concedes, gambling is “really bad,” but it was men and women sharing the same car that shocked some fellow association members.

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“We didn’t do anything wrong,” Ms. Hassan said. “I am chill about that whole coed thing. I understand that in a Muslim context we are not supposed to hang out with the opposite sex, but it just happens and there is nothing you can do.”

But as Saif Inam, the vice president of the chapter at George Washington put it, “At the end of the day, I don’t want God asking me, ‘O.K. Saif, why did you organize events in which people could do un-Islamic things in big numbers?’ ” The debate boils down to whether upholding gender segregation is forcing something artificial and vaguely hypocritical in an American context.

“As American Islam gets its own identity, it is going to have to shed some of these notions that are distant from American culture,” said Rafia Zakaria, a student at Indiana University. “The tension is between what forms of tradition are essential and what forms are open to innovation.”

American law says men and women are equal, whereas Muslim religious texts say they “complement” each other, Ms. Zakaria said. “If the law says they are equal, it’s hard to see how in their spiritual lives they will accept a whole different identity.”

The entire shift of the association from a foreign-run organization to an American one took place over arguments like this.

The Americans won out partly because the number of Muslim American college students hit a critical mass in the late 1990s, and then, after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, foreign students, fearful of their visas being revoked, started avoiding a group that was increasingly political.

Some critics view strict interpretation of the faith as part of the association’s DNA. Organized in the 1960s by foreign students who wanted collective prayers where there were no mosques, the associations were basically little slices of Saudi Arabia. Women were banned. Only Muslim men who prayed, fasted and avoided alcohol and dating were welcomed. Meetings, even idle conversations, were in Arabic.

Donations from Saudi Arabia largely financed the group, and its leaders pushed the kingdom’s puritan, Wahhabi strain of Islam. Prof. Hamid Algar of the University of California, Berkeley, said that in the 1960s and 1970s, chapters advocated theological and political positions derived from radical Islamist organizations and would brook no criticism of Saudi Arabia.

That past has given the associations a reputation in some official quarters as a possible font of extremism, but experts in American Islam believe college campuses have become too diverse and are under too much scrutiny for the groups to foster radicals.

Zareena Grewal, a professor of religion and American studies at Yale, pointed to several things that would repel extremists. Members are trying to become more involved in the American political system, Professor Grewal said, and the heavy presence of women in the leadership would also deter them. Members “are not sitting around reading ‘How to Bomb Your Campus for Dummies,’ ” she said.

Its leaders think the organization is gradually relaxing a bit as it seeks to maintain its status as the main player for Muslim students.

“There were drunkards in the Prophet Muhammad’s community; there were fornicators and people who committed adultery in his community, and he didn’t reject them,” Mr. Mertaban said. “I think M.S.A.’s are beginning to understand this point that every person has ups and downs.”

Despite a 2002 promise from President Bush to put citizenship applications for immigrant members of the military on a fast track, some are finding themselves waiting months, or even years, because of bureaucratic backlogs. One, Sgt. Kendell K. Frederick of the Army, who had tried three times to file for citizenship, was killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq as he returned from submitting fingerprints for his application.

Reach of War

Alan Zale for The New York TimesAbdool Habibullah, an ex-marine, is waiting to hear about his application. “If what I’ve done for this country isn’t enough for me to be a citizen, then I don’t know what is,” he said.

About 7,200 service members or people who have been recently discharged have citizenship applications pending, but neither the Department of Defense nor Citizenship and Immigration Services keeps track of how long they have been waiting. Immigration lawyers and politicians say they have received a significant number of complaints about delays because of background checks, misplaced paperwork, confusion about deployments and other problems.

“I’ve pretty much given up on finding out where my paperwork is, what’s gone wrong, what happened to it,” said Abdool Habibullah, 27, a Guyanese immigrant who first applied for citizenship in 2005 upon returning from a tour in Iraq and was honorably discharged from the Marines as a sergeant. “If what I’ve done for this country isn’t enough for me to be a citizen, then I don’t know what is.”

The long waits are part of a broader problem plaguing the immigration service, which was flooded with 2.5 million applications for citizenship and visas last summer — twice as many as the previous year — in the face of 66 percent fee increases that took effect July 30. Officials have estimated that it will take an average of 18 months to process citizenship applications from legal immigrants through 2010, up from seven months last year.

But service members and veterans are supposed to go to the head of the line. After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, President Bush signed an executive order allowing noncitizens on active duty to file for citizenship right away, instead of having to first complete three years in the military. The federal government has since taken several steps to speed up the process, including training military officers to help service members fill out forms, assigning special teams to handle the paperwork, and allowing citizenship tests, interviews and ceremonies to take place overseas.

At the same time, post-9/11 security measures, including tougher guidelines for background checks that are part of the naturalization process, have slowed things down.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation, which checks the names of citizenship applicants against those in its more than 86 million investigative files, has been overwhelmed, handling an average of 90,000 name-check requests a week. In the fiscal year that ended in September, the F.B.I. was asked to check 4.1 million names, at least half of them for citizenship and green card applicants, a spokesman said.

“Most soldiers clear the checks within 30 to 60 days, or 60 to 90 days,” said Leslie B. Lord, the Army’s liaison to Citizenship and Immigration Services, the federal agency that processes citizenship applications. “But even the soldier with the cleanest of records, if he has a name that’s very similar to one that’s in the F.B.I. bad-boy and bad-girl list, things get delayed.”

Such explanations are why Mr. Habibullah has decided that once he does become a citizen — if he ever becomes a citizen — he will change his name.

“I figured that’s part of the reason things got delayed,” he said. “You know, that I have a Muslim name.”

Thousands of Muslim civilians have also found themselves waiting months or years for background checks, and have filed a class-action lawsuit in federal court in Denver. But advocates for the immigrant service members said that those with pending applications are from a variety of backgrounds and that they do not suspect a pattern of discrimination against Muslims.

Some 31,200 members of the military were sworn in as citizens between October 2002 and December 2007, according to the immigration service, but a spokeswoman, Chris Rhatigan, said she could not determine how long it took for them to be naturalized since the agency does not maintain a database tracking military cases.

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Over all, 312,000 citizenship or green card applications are pending name checks, including 140,000 that have been waiting more than six months, immigration officials said. This month, immigration authorities eased background-check requirements for green cards, saying that if applicants had been waiting more than six months, they could be approved without an F.B.I. check, and approvals could be revoked later “in the unlikely event” that troubling information was found.

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Mr. Mohammed on duty in Iraq, where he was in the Army.

Reach of War Brendan Smialowski for The New York TimesMichelle Murphy, whose son Sgt. Kendell K. Frederick was killed in Iraq before his citizenship application was approved.

After hearing complaints from at least half a dozen service members over the past three months, Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York has drafted a bill to create a special clearinghouse to ensure that applications from active and returning members of the military are processed quickly and smoothly. A spokesman said several other lawmakers reported hearing many similar stories.

“These are men and women who are risking their lives for us,” Mr. Schumer said in a telephone interview. “They’ve met all the requirements for citizenship, they have certainly proved their commitment to our country, and yet they could lose their lives while waiting for a bureaucratic snafu to untangle.”

In interviews, immigration lawyers and military officials said that in general, the naturalization process takes service members between six months and a year, which is about half the current average wait for civilians. But some cases drag on much longer because of background-check delays or because applications are misplaced, or notices are mailed to stateside addresses after an applicant has been deployed, causing appointments to be missed.

“You try to resolve these things amicably, reaching out to the military, reaching out to immigration officials, but you hit roadblock after roadblock,” said David E. Piver, a Pennsylvania lawyer who filed at least six petitions in federal court over the past five years on behalf of service members experiencing longer than usual delays on their citizenship applications.

“It’s usually not any substantive issue that’s causing those delays,” he said. “What it boils down to are bureaucratic snafus.”

Feyad Mohammed, an immigrant from Trinidad and Tobago who lives with his parents in Richmond Hill, Queens, was naturalized last month — four years after he filed the first of four citizenship applications, and six months after his honorable discharge from the Army as a sergeant.

Mr. Mohammed first applied in 2004, after he returned from the first of his two tours in Iraq. But the application seemed to have been lost; when he checked after a few months, he said, no one at the immigration service could tell him where it was or even if it had been received. He filed again in 2005, but missed his interview several months later; it had been scheduled in Iraq, during his second combat tour, but he was home on leave on the appointed day.

After he was discharged in July 2007, Mr. Mohammed filed another application. The paperwork was returned because he had not included a check covering the processing fee, he said, ignoring a Bush administration initiative that exempts combat veterans from application fees for up to a year after discharge. It was then that Mr. Mohammed reached out to Senator Schumer’s office, which helped him file a fourth, and final, time.

When he was sworn in Jan. 25 at the federal courthouse in Downtown Brooklyn, Mr. Mohammed said, he felt “relieved.”

“I was a citizen,” he said. “I could finally move on with my life.”

But Sergeant Frederick, a 21-year-old immigrant from Trinidad, would be awarded citizenship only posthumously, on the day of his burial. He is one of more than 90 immigrant service members to be naturalized after losing their lives in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Sergeant Frederick’s mother, Michelle Murphy, said that he had filed his citizenship application a year before he was deployed to Iraq in 2005, but that his application was sent back to her Maryland home three times — once because of incomplete biographical information, again because he had left a box unchecked, and once more because he had not paid the fee.

Finally, Ms. Murphy said, Sergeant Frederick received a letter saying that the fingerprints he had included with his application could not be read and that he needed to submit new ones. She contacted immigration officials, who arranged for him to submit a new set of fingerprints on Oct. 19, 2005, near his base in Tikrit. On the way back from the appointment, his convoy hit a roadside bomb.

“If somebody is fighting for a country, if he’s deployed, if he’s in the middle of a war, it shouldn’t be that hard for them to become a citizen,” Ms. Murphy, 42, said in a telephone interview.

After his death, the immigration service began accepting enlistment fingerprints with service members’ citizenship applications, provided applicants authorized the military to share their files with immigration officials. A bill to make such sharing automatic has been passed by the House and is pending a final Senate vote.

In the meantime, Mr. Habibullah is working as an aircraft hydraulics mechanic in Connecticut, though he hopes to get a better-paying job in the federal government once he is naturalized. In October, Mr. Habibullah’s father and grandmother became citizens in separate ceremonies, though they applied fully two years after he did.

Mr. Habibullah has passed the citizenship test and been interviewed, and he said he does not know what to do to move his application through the backlog faster.

“Every time I ask about it, I get the same answer: it’s pending the background check,” Mr. Habibullah said as he looked over his military medals, which are displayed on a wall in the Mount Vernon, N.Y., apartment he shares with his wife and 1-month-old son. “I’m at the point right now that I’ve almost given up on it.”

**Let's see what the New Duranty Times didn't find newsworthy about the Muslim Student Association....**Islamism's Campus Club

By Jonathan Dowd-GaileyMiddle East Quarterly | 6/2/2004

The northern Virginia-based Muslim Students' Association (MSA) might easily be taken for a benign student religious group. It promotes itself as a benevolent, non-political entity devoted to the simple virtue of celebrating Islam and providing college students a healthy venue to develop their faith and engage in philanthropy. Along these lines, its constitution declares the MSA's mission as serving "the best interest of Islam and Muslims in the United States and Canada so as to enable them to practice Islam as a complete way of life."[1]

Today, over 150 MSA chapters exist on American college campuses (divided into five regional chapters), easily establishing this organization as the most extensive Muslim student organization in North America. A Washington, D.C.-based national office assists in the establishment of constituent chapters and oversees fundraising and conferences while steering a plethora of special committees and "Political Action Task Forces."

Yet consider some of these recent activities of the MSA:

· At a meeting in Queensborough Community College in New York in March 2003, a guest speaker named Faheed declared, "We reject the U.N., reject America, reject all law and order. Don't lobby Congress or protest because we don't recognize Congress. The only relationship you should have with America is to topple it ... Eventually there will be a Muslim in the White House dictating the laws of Shariah."[2]

· During an October 2000 anti-Israeli protest, former MSA president Ahmed Shama at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) stood before the Israeli consulate in Los Angeles, shouting "Victory to Islam! Death to the Jews!" MSA West president Sohail Shakr declared at the same rally, "the biggest impediment to peace [in the Middle East] has been the existence of the Zionist entity in the middle of the Muslim world."[3]

· Prior to September 11, 2001, the MSA formally assisted three Islamic charities in fundraising: the Holy Land Foundation, Global Relief, and Benevolence Foundation. After that date, all three were accused by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) of having serious links to terrorism and were ordered closed. The MSA issued a formal statement of protest: "How three of the nation's largest Muslim charities could be made inoperable at the peak of the giving season of Ramadan seemed unbelievable."[4]

This is only the tip of the iceberg. There is overwhelming evidence that the MSA, far from being a benign student society, is an overtly political organization seeking to create a single Muslim voice on U.S. campuses-a voice espousing Wahhabism, anti-Americanism, and anti-Semitism, agitating aggressively against U.S. Middle East policy, and expressing solidarity with militant Islamist ideologies, sometimes with criminal results.

A Saudi Creation

On its website, the MSA describes its emergence as spontaneous and disavows any link to foreign governments.[5] In fact, the creation of the MSA resulted from Saudi-backed efforts to found Islamic bodies internationally in the 1960s. Alex Alexiev of the Center for Security Policy states, "The Saudis over the years set up a number of large front organizations, such as the World Muslim League, the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, the Al Haramain Foundation, and a great number of Islamic "charities." While invariably claiming that they were private, all of these groups were tightly controlled and financed by the Saudi government and the Wahhabi clergy."[6]

In the United States, two leading Saudi-backed organizations were the MSA and the Islamic Society of North America (the MSA's adult counterpart), both of which received major funding, direction, and influence from Riyadh.

Personnel, money, and institutional linkages bound these organizations together from their inception, and all roads led eventually to Riyadh. Ahmad Totonji, an MSA co-founder, later served as vice-president for the notorious Saudi SAAR Foundation (a network of charities named after Saudi benefactor Sulayman 'Abd al-'Aziz ar-Rajhi), which closed down in 2001 after federal agents discovered links to terrorist groups.[7] Another MSA co-founder, Ahmad Sakr, served on a number of Saudi-affiliated organizations, such as the World Council of Mosques. The MSA is very much a result of Saudi "petro-Islam" diplomacy.

Current estimates suggest that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia spends $4 billion annually on international aid, with two-thirds of that sum devoted to strictly Islamic development. Much of this largesse has ended up at Islamist organizations like MSA. Funded through private donations or through foundations and charities (only some of which the MSA officially reports),[8] MSA offers its Saudi benefactors a powerful tool. However, until the MSA's tax records are made public (on January 14, 2004, the Senate Finance Committee publicized a list of Islamic organizations whose financial records are sought, including the MSA),[9] the exact extent of foreign funding for the organization cannot be known.

But even without the tax records, there is plenty of evidence for the MSA's strident advocacy of the Saudi-style Wahhabi interpretation of Islam. In "Wahhabism: A Critical Essay," Hamid Algar of the University of California-Berkeley writes, "Some Muslim student organizations have functioned at times as Saudi-supported channels for the propagation of Wahhabism abroad, especially in the United States ... Particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, no criticism of Saudi Arabia would be tolerated at the annual conventions of the MSA. The organization has, in fact, consistently advocated theological and political positions derived from radical Islamist organizations, including the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaati Islam."[10]

The MSA has played a major role in spreading Wahhabism. "Its numerous local chapters," Algar explains, "would make available at every Friday prayer large stacks of the [Mecca-based] World Muslim League's publications, in both English and Arabic. Although the MSA progressively diversified its connections with Arab states, official approval of Wahhabism remained strong."[11]

Stephen Schwartz goes further, stating in his June 2003 testimony to the U.S. Senate's Subcommittee on Terrorism and Homeland Security, "Shia and other non-Wahhabi Muslim community leaders estimate that 80 percent of American mosques out of a total ranging between an official estimate of 1,200 and an unofficial figure of 4-6,000 are under Wahhabi control ... Wahhabi control over mosques means control of property, buildings, appointment of imams, training of imams, content of preaching including faxing of Friday sermons from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and of literature distributed in mosques and mosque bookstores, notices on bulletin boards, and organizational and charitable solicitation ... The main organizations that have carried out this campaign are the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), which originated in the Muslim Students' Association of the U.S. and Canada (MSA), and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)."[12]

The MSA reflects a prime characteristic of militant Islamic groups: a refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of secular society and personal spirituality. The MSA's Starters Guide contains an open call to Islamicize campus politics: "It should be the long-term goal of every MSA to Islamicize the politics of their respective university ... the politicization of the MSA means to make the MSA more of a force on internal campus politics. The MSA needs to be a more "In-your-face" association."[13]

All of this, the guide explains, results from the MSA's duty "to bring morality back into the campus" and to convince students to practice Islam "as a complete way of life."

In the process, the MSA preaches a creed of "special treatment" and "self-segregation" that sounds reminiscent of, and may actually borrow from, Afro-centric campus politics of the 1990s. Demanding that universities be more "Muslim-friendly," the MSA's newly established National Religious Accommodations Task Force (RATF) directs local MSA chapters to insist that universities provide separate housing and meals for Muslims only.[14]

The politics of segregation practiced by the MSA have included blanket marginalization of its own female members. Shabana Mir, writing for the American Muslim, summarizes the plight of Muslim women on campus: "It is particularly important to know what is happening with Muslim women pursuing higher education. Many Muslim women in MSAs are working toward the justice and the equality that Islam ordains for humankind. A survey of sisters' participation in MSAs conducted in 1994 shows that women's activism in MSAs is at an abysmally low level due in large part to "brother domination." A related problem is "there is a common attitude that strict segregation should exist between the genders and that sisters should not appear in public!" On an MSA mailing list, a popular article gives a long list of conditions that women must fulfill to gain access to the mosque. These include obtaining permission from her male guardian, wearing hijab [veil], not wearing "fancy clothes" or perfume, not mixing with men, leaving immediately after the prayer, and so on!" [15]

Political Monopoly

Just as the MSA promotes a single theology, it similarly projects a monolithic political voice, one openly antagonistic to Muslim American diversity and in complete opposition to existing U.S. foreign policy. Although Muslim students in the United States exhibit the full range of political views found in America today, the MSA invariably adopts lopsided adversarial positions, as in these three cases:

Patriot Act: The MSA categorically opposes this legislation, describing it as "infamous." Chapters across the country have agitated against it, as well as against virtually every other security initiative since 9/11. At an MSA rally at the University of Pennsylvania, the co-chair of Muslims for Justice declared, "the Patriot Act is sending us in a backwards spiral, where the destination is chaos."[16]

Afghanistan: The MSA opposed the military intervention against the Taliban regime, instead calling for a "police investigation." MSA National further advised that the entire matter would be best addressed at the International Criminal Tribunal. MSA chapters organized rallies demanding a ceasefire and held "Solidarity Fasts" to honor Afghans who, the MSA charged, would face massive starvation as a result of the war.

Iraq: Even before the crisis of 2003, the MSA opposed every U.S. policy towards Iraq over the last twelve years. It strongly opposed the United Nations (U.N.)-authorized sanctions, claiming that the sanctions were "nothing short of a systematic genocide being carried out against civilian people."[17] The MSA condemned former president Clinton's 1998 strike against Iraq following Saddam Hussein's ouster of U.N. weapons inspectors, declaring that its "brothers and sisters in Iraq are once again being terrorized by the self-appointed champions of democracy."[18]

MSA National consistently pledges support for the war on terror and claims to merely "represent" student views. But it maintains control of the political agenda, leaving the chapters simply to mobilize support. Its chapters pointedly ignored the New York Shi'ites who held vigils for their Iraqi brethren and the Michigan Kurds who rallied for Hussein's ouster. The MSA's decision to mobilize against the Bush administration took place without public debate and with no attempt at representing diverse views within the MSA. This approach is in keeping with the MSA's goal, as its official literature states, that the student body "be convinced that there is such a thing as a Muslim-bloc."[19]

Muslim students who refuse to submit to the MSA's position often find themselves harassed by their MSA peers. Oubai Shahbandar, an Arizona State University (ASU) student, expressed support for the Iraqi invasion and suffered condemnation from MSA members. Shahbandar states, "When I, a proud American of Arab descent and Muslim faith, took a stand on behalf of the liberation of my oppressed Iraqi brethren, the ASU Muslim Students' Association personally attacked me for not being a real Muslim and announced to the ASU student body in editorials in the student paper that I, Oubai Mohammad Shahbandar, was a hater of Arabs and Muslims."

Shahbandar also explains what the MSA preaches on his campus: "We are told America's foreign policy is based on racist neo-imperialism; we are taught that national security is a foul epithet to be reviled; we are told the Jews and Israel are to blame for the hatred against us."[20]

Playing the Victim

The MSA's adoption of the politics of victimization is reminiscent of wider campus trends of the 1990s. In the days immediately after the 9/11 attacks, the MSA stated, "In light of the Bush administration's casting blame for the attack on Osama Bin Laden, MSA National recognizes that Muslim students on college campuses will be subject to backlash."

Ominously, an "awareness" document describes post 9/11 Homeland Security policies in the same terms as do extremist Muslims abroad-that is, as an assault explicitly against Islam. America: Post 9/11, an MSA document, states, "Soon after [9/11], the attacks against our religion began at the hands of the media and the political establishment."[21]

Not surprisingly, the MSA has expressed resistance, outrage, and cynicism with virtually every high-profile arrest of Muslim Americans charged with conspiring with terrorists. When former University of South Florida (USF) professor Sami al-Arian was arrested for directing U.S. operations for the terrorist group Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Florida campus MSA chapter held a press conference and stated: "We come before you today on behalf of the Muslim Student Association at USF as well as the National Muslim Student Association of the U.S. and Canada to express our shock, deep concern, and plea for justice regarding the recent arrests of two USF professors, Dr. Sami al-Arian and Sameeh Hammoudeh ... we are concerned that the USF professors were arrested for their political views."

The problem is that the MSA has been unable or unwilling to recognize that some Muslims, including its members, have crossed the line between political advocacy and material support for jihadist activities. In fact, MSA members and activities have repeatedly surfaced in police investigations. Some of these arrests received national media coverage, including the following:

· In February 2003, former head of the MSA chapter at the University of Idaho, Sami Omar al-Hussayen, was arrested with an indictment that he raised over $300,000 for the Islamic Assembly of North America, a group under federal investigation for funding terrorist groups. FBI agents believed Hussayen was communicating with two radical clerics, nicknamed the "awakening sheikhs," known for inspiring young Muslims to pursue the path of jihad and credited as major ideological mentors to Osama bin Laden.[22]

· In April 2003, the home of Arizona State University MSA president Hassan Alrafea was raided by the FBI, whose agents confiscated his computer and unspecified documents.[23]

In 2002, when the number of anti-Semitic attacks in Europe hit a twelve-year high, French Jewish leader Roger Cukierman observed a peculiar phenomenon on the European street -a loose fusing of extreme Left, Right, and Muslim political forces-what Cukierman terms the "brown-green-red alliance."[24] The three disparate constituencies have incompatible ideologies, but all three have a shared hatred for the pluralized world order, globalized market economies, U.S. preponderance, and the state of Israel. Cukierman has observed these forces forming an alliance of convenience in the post-9/11 world with potentially dangerous results.

The same pattern is also emerging in the United States with groups of the extreme Left forging bonds with specific Muslim organizations, and here again we find the MSA figures prominently. Given the MSA's propensity for radical politics in a campus environment, it is no surprise that it has become arguably the Muslim organization most enmeshed with American leftists. Consider the following:

· Perhaps as a reward for its total opposition to every U.S. policy since the September 2001 attacks, the MSA has been given a seat on the steering committee for International ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism). ANSWER is an organization dedicated to defending rogue states and fighting "U.S. imperialism," and has been distinguished by its ability to organize the largest peace demonstrations in North America. ANSWER was formed by International Action Center, a communist organization that supports Stalinist regimes worldwide, including North Korea and Hussein's Iraq. [25]

As these examples suggest, the MSA boasts institutional ties with a host of radical issue-specific activist groups, all of them vehemently opposed to U.S. policy, and many of them openly anti-American.

The Center for Security Policy's Alex Alexiev argues, "The majority of Muslim Student Associations at U.S. colleges are dominated by Islamist and anti-American agendas, as are most of the numerous Islamic centers and schools financed by the Saudis. Intolerance and outright rejection of American values and democratic ideals are often taught also in the growing number of Deobandi schools that are frequently subsidized by the Saudis."[26]

The following examples illustrate both the degree and pervasiveness of hate-America vitriol that characterize the MSA:

· Taliban propaganda is featured on the website of the University of Southern California MSA chapter.[27]

· One featured article in Al-Talib (a magazine developed by the UCLA chapter of the MSA and not affiliated with the Taliban of Afghanistan) entitled, "The Spirit of Jihad," praised Osama bin Laden as a "prominent Muslim activist." The article goes on to say, "When we hear someone refer to the great mujahideen Osama bin Laden as a 'terrorist,' we should defend our brother and refer to him as a freedom fighter; someone who has forsaken wealth and power to fight in Allah's cause and speak out against oppressors." [28]

· Another Al-Talib article entitled "Americanization" states, "A dangerous weapon has once again been unfurled by the U.S. military in this War on Terrorism ... This weapon comes in the form of cultural warfare ... In this new War on Terrorism, the colossal brunt of this production machine is now squarely targeted at the Muslim population." [29]

· At an Al-Talib event to offer support for Imam Jamil al-Amin, convicted of killing a policeman, guest speaker Imam Abdul-Alim Musa said, "When you fight [the U.S.] you are fighting someone that is superior in criminality and Nazism ... the American criminalizer is the most skillful oppressor the world has ever known ...They beat the British at everything, isn't that right? They are a better colonizer, a better murderer, a better killer, a better liar, a better thief, a better infiltrator than old British." [30]

This anti-Americanism blends together almost seamlessly with a virulent discourse against the Jews and Israel. Consider the following:

· At the 2001 MSA West conference, hosted by UCLA, cleric Imam Muhammad al-Asi stated, "Israel is as racist as apartheid could ever be ... you can take a Jew out of the ghetto, but you can't take the ghetto out of the Jew."[31]

· The MSA continues to celebrate violence against Israel on its websites. At the MSA Northwest site, for example, images of Hamas suicide squads and child soldiers are proudly displayed above jihadist poetry, whose verse (erratically capitalized) celebrates violence: "...two soldiers spotted me in their sight ... i had to blast 4 shots hitting each one in the face and waist. a trace of blood drips from my arm as i make my away thru streets with an injured zionist as a hostage ... seen a group of israeli soldiers run out and began pulling the trigger when sounds of rounds began playing a deadly melody. Each gun dropped two ..." [32]

· In 2002, the MSA at the University of Michigan helped host the Second National Student Conference for Palestine Solidarity Movement. At that conference, one of the guest speakers was ex-University of Florida professor Sami al-Arian, who is now awaiting trial on terrorism-related charges.

Self-Defeating

Ironically, although one of the founding missions of the MSA is to increase favorable awareness of Muslim life among non-Muslims, the effect of the MSA's activities is the opposite: they confirm the worst suspicions of American society at large. The MSA's refusal to identify jihadists and jihadist sympathizers within its ranks, its indiscriminate opposition to U.S. policies following the September 11 attacks, its vitriolic anti-American and anti-Israeli rhetoric, and its solidarity with "Leftover Left" radical activist organizations, together reinforce an image that the MSA, and by extension, Muslim college students, are a divisive, angry, and potentially violent group on our campuses. By monopolizing the Muslim student voice in America with "radical chic" to create a "single Muslim bloc," an opportunity to forge a healthy discourse on the diverse attitudes of Muslim students is lost to the confrontational language of radical dissent and resistance.

Universities that host student organizations have an obligation to enforce basic standards of conduct, standards that the MSA has clearly breached. At the very least, MSA's most egregious behavior must face censure from those responsible for monitoring student conduct. University administrators must unchain themselves from cultural relativism and the ideology of "validation" and deal squarely with such misdeeds.

More importantly, however, the problem of the Muslim Students' Association illustrates the great question that confronts the West today: how does it cultivate liberalism in Muslim communities living at home and abroad? Just as the U.S. policy of détente with the Arab world collapsed after September 11, to be replaced by a "forward strategy of democracy," it may be time to adopt a "forward strategy" within U.S. borders, focused on promoting moderate voices in mosques and campuses. To improve campus life for Muslims and non-Muslims alike, universities should work with moderate students to inaugurate a new Muslim students' organization, one that eschews the radical politics of the "old world" in favor of authenticity, diversity, and integration. A new Muslim student organization would return to the primary mission of religiously-based campus groups-to celebrate and share in the fellowship of faith.

The WorldNetDaily story below is a MUST-READ, for two reasons. First, the study reported in the story confirms what a Freedom House study of a few years ago found – that a high percentage of mosques in the United States are promoting hatred, violence, jihad, and the goal of sharia law to replace American constitutional law.

An undercover survey of more than 100 mosques and Islamic schools in America has exposed widespread radicalism, including the alarming finding that 3 in 4 Islamic centers are hotbeds of anti-Western extremism, WND has learned [emphasis added].The Mapping Sharia in America Project, sponsored by the Washington-based Center for Security Policy, has trained former counterintelligence and counterterrorism agents from the FBI, CIA and U.S. military, who are skilled in Arabic and Urdu, to conduct undercover reconnaissance at some 2,300 mosques and Islamic centers and schools across the country."So far of 100 mapped, 75 should be on a watchlist," an official familiar with the project said [emphasis added].Many of the Islamic centers are operating under the auspices of the Saudi Arabian government and U.S. front groups for the radical Muslim Brotherhood based in Egypt.

Frank Gaffney, a former Pentagon official who runs the Center for Security Policy, says the results of the survey have not yet been published. But he confirmed that "the vast majority" are inciting insurrection and jihad through sermons by Saudi-trained imams and anti-Western literature, videos and textbooks.

The project, headed by David Yerushalmi, a lawyer and expert on sharia law, has finished collecting data from the first cohort of 102 mosques and schools. Preliminary findings indicate that almost 80 percent of the group exhibit a high level of sharia-compliance and jihadi threat, including:

Ultra-orthodox worship in which women are separated from men in the prayer hall and must enter the mosque from a separate, usually back, entrance; and are required to wear hijabs.

Sermons that preach women are inferior to men and can be beaten for disobedience; that non-Muslims, particularly Jews, are infidels and inferior to Muslims; that jihad or support of jihad is not only a Muslim's duty but the noblest way, and suicide bombers and other so-called "martyrs" are worthy of the highest praise; and that an Islamic caliphate should one day encompass the U.S. [emphasis added].

Though not all mosques in America are radicalized, many have tended to serve as safe havens and meeting points for Islamic terrorist groups. Experts say there are at least 40 episodes of extremists and terrorists being connected to mosques in the past decade alone.

Some of the 9/11 hijackers, in fact, received aid and counsel from one of the largest mosques in the Washington, D.C., area. Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center is one of the mosques identified by undercover investigators as a hive of terrorist activity and other extremism.

It was founded and is currently run by leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood. Imams there preach what is called "jihad qital," which means physical jihad, and incite violence and hatred against the U.S.

Dar al-Hijrah's ultimate goal, investigators say, is to turn the U.S. into an Islamic state governed by sharia law [emphasis added].Another D.C.-area mosque, the ADAMS Center, was founded and financed by members of the Muslim Brotherhood, and has been one of the top distributors of Wahhabist anti-Semitic and anti-Christian dogma.

Even with such radical mosques operating in its backyard, the U.S. government has not undertaken its own systematic investigation of U.S. mosques [emphasis added].

In contrast, European Union security officials are analyzing member-state mosques, examining the training and funding sources of imams, in a large-scale project.

Some U.S. lawmakers want the U.S. to conduct its own investigation.

"We have too many mosques in this country," said Rep. Pete King, R-N.Y. "There are too many people who are sympathetic to radical Islam. We should be looking at them more carefully."

ACT for America is an issues advocacy organization dedicated to effectively organizing and mobilizing the most powerful grassroots citizen action network in America, a grassroots network committed to informed and coordinated civic action that will lead to public policies that promote America’s national security and the defense of American democratic values against the assault of radical Islam. We are only as strong as our supporters, and your volunteer and financial support is essential to our success. Thank you for helping us make America safer and more secure.

In response to a request by female Muslim students, Harvard University has created women-only workout hours at one of its campus gyms. The decision has angered some students at the Ivy League university.

Since Jan. 28, the Quadrangle Recreational Athletic Center has been open only to women from 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. on Mondays.

The change was prompted by a request from the Harvard College Women's Center, which was approached by six female Muslim students, said Robert Mitchell, communications director of Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

"It was done for religious purposes, but it's not closed to other women who may want to participate," he said.

Ola Aljawhary, a student and a member of the Harvard Islamic Society, said the women-only gym is needed.

"These hours are necessary because there is a segment of the Harvard female population that is not found in gyms, not because they don't want to work out, but because for them working out in a co-ed gym is uncomfortable, awkward or problematic in some way," she told Boston University's Daily Free Press./**/ Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, in Washington D.C., said modesty may prevent some Muslim women from exercising in a co-ed environment.

"If the women are dressed in a manner that makes it more comfortable to exercise, they may not feel it’s appropriate for them to be viewed by men in that particular attire," he said.

But the change has angered students like Nicholas Wells, a junior who called the change a "lose-lose" situation in an opinion article he wrote for the Harvard Crimson newspaper.

"It is an unreasonable policy that is unjust to men and useless to women," he wrote.

"Rather than a genuine attempt to provide comfortable workout hours for women and religious observers who might be uncomfortable working out around men, this policy beats around the bush by offering the least utilized and the most inconvenient hours and gym space," he said. "No one benefits from women’s only hours."

The Quadrangle Recreational Athletic Center is one of three large recreational facilities on the Cambridge, Mass., campus, though most of the 12 residential houses also have workout facilities, Mitchell said. A large Harvard athletic center is also available for use on the Boston side of the St. Charles River.

Harvard has made many accommodations for students' religious needs, Mitchell said. Those include prayer areas for Hindu and Muslim students as well as the rescheduling of exams to accommodate religious holidays."This is just yet another of what we thought was a reasonable request for some special times because of religion, not because of gender," Mitchell said.

The women-only hours are being tested on a trial basis and will be evaluated at the end of the semester, he said.

Reports of the Harvard decision have sparked discussion in student publications across the country, including the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where an athletics department spokesman said such a measure would be "hard to pull off" in the campus' primary gym.

In Defense of the ConstitutionNews & Analysis003/08 March 26, 2008CAIR: The Treason from Within; Another CAIR Official Indicted

On Wednesday, 26 March, a Grand Jury indictment against Muthanna Al-Hanooti was unsealed in Michigan. The indictment accuses Al-Hanooti of violations of 18 and 50 United States Code. The specifics include allegations that Al-Hanooti provided information on members of the congress who were of interest to the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS), acted under direction of the IIS, accepted payments in oil (two million barrels) from the Iraqi government for acting as its agent, and provided a written brief to the Iraqi government outlining methods that could be used to lift the sanctions then in place against Iraq.

Al-Hanooti was the executive director of CAIR’s then-new regional office in Michigan at the time he committed the alleged crimes. Once again, we see the dirty black hand of CAIR connected to yet another arguably traitorous individual who apparently sold out “his” country for 30 pieces of silver.

For over a decade, we Americans have allowed CAIR to dictate to us how we should behave, believe, and react to Islam in our country. We have kow-towed to CAIR’s demands for special rights based on Islam; watched our law enforcement genuflect at the feet of radical Islamists; observed our president and other elected leaders contort our language to comport with CAIR’s demands, and we have, for the most part, remained silent.

Silent, no more!

How many CAIR connected radical Muslims will we tolerate before we DEMAND of our President that he close down CAIR as he did the Holy Land Foundation? How many treasonous acts are too many? What is the tipping point for CAIR-connected crimes against our country? How many of our brave warriors must die in the war on terror before we close down what is arguably the Embassy for Hamas in North America - CAIR?

The day has finally come when we Americans can no longer say about CAIR that “we didn’t know”.

CAIR has told us, numerous times, that they are here to defend radical Islam, that they want the United States to become an Islamic dictatorship, and that they approve of the actions of many Islamist terrorist groups and individuals; including those that terror-murder on an almost daily basis women and children.

Recently, I wrote about Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy (TIZA), a K-8 charter school in Inver Grove Heights. Charter schools are public schools and by law must not endorse or promote religion.

Evidence suggests, however, that TIZA is an Islamic school, funded by Minnesota taxpayers.

TIZA has many characteristics that suggest a religious school. It shares the headquarters building of the Muslim American Society of Minnesota, whose mission is "establishing Islam in Minnesota." The building also houses a mosque. TIZA's executive director, Asad Zaman, is a Muslim imam, or religious leader, and its sponsor is an organization called Islamic Relief.

Students pray daily, the cafeteria serves halal food - permissible under Islamic law -- and "Islamic Studies" is offered at the end of the school day.

Zaman maintains that TIZA is not a religious school. He declined, however, to allow me to visit the school to see for myself, "due to the hectic schedule for statewide testing." But after I e-mailed him that the Minnesota Department of Education had told me that testing would not begin for several weeks, Zaman did not respond -- even to urgent calls and e-mails seeking comment before my first column on TIZA.

Now, however, an eyewitness has stepped forward. Amanda Getz of Bloomington is a substitute teacher. She worked as a substitute in two fifth-grade classrooms at TIZA on Friday, March 14. Her experience suggests that school-sponsored religious activity plays an integral role at TIZA.

Arriving on a Friday, the Muslim holy day, she says she was told that the day's schedule included a "school assembly" in the gym after lunch.

Before the assembly, she says she was told, her duties would include taking her fifth-grade students to the bathroom, four at a time, to perform "their ritual washing."

Afterward, Getz said, "teachers led the kids into the gym, where a man dressed in white with a white cap, who had been at the school all day," was preparing to lead prayer. Beside him, another man "was prostrating himself in prayer on a carpet as the students entered."

"The prayer I saw was not voluntary," Getz said. "The kids were corralled by adults and required to go to the assembly where prayer occurred."

Islamic Studies was also incorporated into the school day. "When I arrived, I was told 'after school we have Islamic Studies,' and I might have to stay for hall duty," Getz said. "The teachers had written assignments on the blackboard for classes like math and social studies. Islamic Studies was the last one -- the board said the kids were studying the Qu'ran. The students were told to copy it into their planner, along with everything else. That gave me the impression that Islamic Studies was a subject like any other."

After school, Getz's fifth-graders stayed in their classroom and the man in white who had led prayer in the gym came in to teach Islamic Studies. TIZA has in effect extended the school day -- buses leave only after Islamic Studies is over. Getz did not see evidence of other extra-curricular activity, except for a group of small children playing outside. Significantly, 77 percent of TIZA parents say that their "main reason for choosing TIZA ... was because of after-school programs conducted by various non-profit organizations at the end of the school period in the school building," according to a TIZA report. TIZA may be the only school in Minnesota with this distinction.

Why does the Minnesota Department of Education allow this sort of religious activity at a public school? According to Zaman, the department inspects TIZA regularly -- and has done so "numerous times" -- to ensure that it is not a religious school.

But the department's records document only three site visits to TIZA in five years -- two in 2003-04 and one in 2007, according to Assistant Commissioner Morgan Brown. None of the visits focused specifically on religious practices.

The department is set up to operate on a "complaint basis," and "since 2004, we haven't gotten a single complaint about TIZA," Brown said. In 2004, he sent two letters to the school inquiring about religious activity reported by visiting department staffers and in a news article. Brown was satisfied with Zaman's assurance that prayer is "voluntary" and "student-led," he said. The department did not attempt to confirm this independently, and did not ask how 5- to 11-year-olds could be initiating prayer. (At the time, TIZA was a K-5 school.)

Zaman agreed to respond by e-mail to concerns raised about the school's practices. Student "prayer is not mandated by TIZA," he wrote, and so is legal. On Friday afternoons, "students are released ... to either join a parent-led service or for study hall." Islamic Studies is provided by the Muslim American Society of Minnesota, and other "nonsectarian" after-school options are available, he added.

Yet prayer at TIZA does not appear to be spontaneously initiated by students, but rather scheduled, organized and promoted by school authorities.

Request for volunteers

Until recently, TIZA's website included a request for volunteers to help with "Friday prayers." In an e-mail, Zaman explained this as an attempt to ensure that "no TIZA staff members were involved in organizing the Friday prayers."

But an end run of this kind cannot remove the fact of school sponsorship of prayer services, which take place in the school building during school hours. Zaman does not deny that "some" Muslim teachers "probably" attend. According to federal guidelines on prayer in schools, teachers at a public school cannot participate in prayer with students.

In addition, schools cannot favor one religion by offering services for only its adherents, or promote after-school religious instruction for only one group. The ACLU of Minnesota has launched an investigation of TIZA, and the Minnesota Department of Education has also begun a review.

TIZA's operation as a public, taxpayer-funded school is troubling on several fronts. TIZA is skirting the law by operating what is essentially an Islamic school at taxpayer expense. The Department of Education has failed to provide the oversight necessary to catch these illegalities, and appears to lack the tools to do so. In addition, there's a double standard at work here -- if TIZA were a Christian school, it would likely be gone in a heartbeat.

TIZA is now being held up as a national model for a new kind of charter school. If it passes legal muster, Minnesota taxpayers may soon find themselves footing the bill for a separate system of education for Muslims.

In an article carried by MyrtleBeachOnline.com, Rep. Sue Myrick says she wants America to "wake up" and do something about terrorism.

To that end, Rep. Myrick has introduced a ten-points plan apparently designed to both alert Americans to the threat of terrorism and also lay out a blue-print for taking action now to hopefully prevent incidents in future.

Among Myrick's points (Wake Up America") is a call for examining the tax exempt status of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) a Washington, D.C. based front group that supports Islamist terrorism and Islamist terrorists in North America .

When Ibrahim Hooper, CAIR spokesman, was asked about Myrick's plan, he attempted to tie in valid concerns about CAIR to "anti-Muslim hate sites" on the internet:

"It sounds like your usual laundry list of talking points you can see on anti-Muslim hate sites on the Internet"

Typical of Hoopers disingenuous attempt to paint CAIR as the innocent victim, he completely failed to explain why CAIR shouldn't be investigated.

For instance, can Hooper:

- Deny that CAIR receives foreign funding? - Refute accusations that CAIR actively supports Islamist terrorists and terrorist groups? - Show that CAIR is not in America as part of a plan to overthrow the government and replace it with an Islamic theocracy? - Explain just how CAIR should retain its tax exempt status in light of CAIR's dirty hands?

Hooper can't credibly defend CAIR from any of these accusations and he knows it.

So, he does the next best thing which is to play the "woe is us" card.

It looks like Rep. Myrick is one of those few in the Congress who "gets it" when it comes to radical Islam.

We wish her luck in her investigation of CAIR and we have no doubt that if she is able to fully investigate CAIR that not only will CAIR's tax exempt status be in jeopardy, perhaps the whole organization will be as well.

Gaubatz: Islamic Manual in Falls Church, Virginia Calls on Muslims to Attack Olympians, Kill Priests and Nuns, Wage War on All Christians

Dave Gaubatz has posted a very distrubing discovery regarding a Jihad manual being sold at the Halalco Supermarket in Falls Church, Virginia. As Dave explains it on his Kids&Terrorism Blog:

"On 29 April 2008, I shopped at Halalco to verify the book is still available. It is located in the "Jihad" section of the bookstore. The manager 'Tariq' can show you the book and it is available for $12.95.

Following are some of the quotes:

1. "It is, in short, time to identify the enemy and declare the Jihad. Identify the enemy. Declare the Jihad. define its parameters. Indicate its opening statements. Delineate its outcome and indicate its end".

2. "The enemy is not merely a personnel but a method, a deen, with its Temples, the banks; with its holy places, the Stock Exchanges of the world; and its false scriptures, the data banks of figures, these magical millions and billions that hold the world's poor to ransom for the sake of a small elite of kafir power brokers, their core jewish, their allies the lawless Christians. It is with these the war must be waged".

3. "He who equips a fighter in the way of Allah, or looks after a fighters family at home is as good as one who fought".

4. "Priests in their churches, unlike recluse worshipping monks, should, of course be killed without any exception. Nuns along with Monks, deserve killing even more".

5. "No one has yet contemplated the impact of one destroyed Stock Exchange or Central Bank Archive".

6. "Not taking the jews and Christians as friends, not following their deen, not submitting to bid'a, neither its holidays (National Days, etc), nor in habits, not entering their places of worship, nor participating in their festivals-all this is vital in the prelude to the attack of a new Jihad."

7. "Strike at the time least expected. It follows that one should also strike at the place not expected. By extension, in light of the current situation, one may strike at several centres all at the same time, thus causing havoc in the enemy and in their response".

8. "One thing is certain-if the kuffar accept us and approve of us and claim they can live alongside us, then we have lost our Islam. The whole body-worshipping mushrik cult of Olympic fire worshipping sport is something unacceptable"."

ACT for America is an issues advocacy organization dedicated to effectively organizing and mobilizing the most powerful grassroots citizen action network in America, a grassroots network committed to informed and coordinated civic action that will lead to public policies that promote America’s national security and the defense of American democratic values against the assault of radical Islam. We are only as strong as our supporters, and your volunteer and financial support is essential to our success. Thank you for helping us make America safer and more secure.

By Joseph MyersWords matter, and in the global war on terror we are losing the battle of words, in a self-inflicted defeat. The consequences could not be more profound.

Recent government policy memoranda, circulating through the national counter-terrorism and diplomatic community, establishes a new "speech code" for the lexicon in the war on terror, as reported by the Associated Press and now available in the public domain .

These new "speech codes" recommended that analysts and policy makers avoid the terms jihad or jihadist or mujhadid or "al-Qaida movement" and replace them with "extremists" and by extension other non-specific terms.

The use of these "new words" and rejection of the "old words" is ostensibly designed to avoid legitimating al-Qaida and its followers while mollifying the sensitivities of the larger Muslim community.

This culmination of previous trends does not surprise me at all.

This is more than simply dancing on the pinhead of cultural sensitivity-words have meaning, ideas have consequences.

This policy is a strategic collapse.

It does nothing to improve our strategic comprehension of the threat or improve our foreign strategic communications; in fact it reinforces existing conceptual problems and risks confusing our messaging with our own actual knowledge of the jihadist threat.

It is a failure of commission, a collapse of competency and reason. It is a collapse of precision and possibly the most profound setback in the war on terror since 9-11, when the global jihad brought itself to our attention.

Clausewitz noted that in war the moral factors are perhaps the most important, and we have just demonstrated we neither have the moral clarity or moral fortitude to comprehend the nature of the war we are in. Dr. Antulio Echevarria of the Army's Strategic Studies Institute stated once that the "US military does not have a doctrine for war as much as it has a doctrine for operations and battles" and we have just demonstrated we don't have the comprehension of this war as much as we can comprehend its operations and battles.

The AP report highlights a level of ignorance and hubris by the functionaries speaking to this topic so grave that is raises my concern about the actual extent that our government is in fact co-opted by our enemies.

War is a complex endeavor, there are no silver-bullet weapons, theories, words or phrases that will disarm our enemies or shape the cultural attitudes of the jihadists or other fellow Muslims. Only how the Islamic world doctrinally perceives and receives the claims of legitimacy of al-Qaida and the rest of the global Islamic movement will determine that outcome -- not any mincing of words by the West.

But it is important that we use the right words so that the West and the American people can understand the nature of our global challenge in this war as much as anyone else.

No Global Threat Model

Over the last several years, there have been numerous examples of incredible malfeasance and lack of due diligence in homeland security, prediction and investigations evidenced by the reporting of, for example, Patrick Poole in his Hometown Jihad series.

Also the schizophrenic activities of our government in dealing with the Muslim Brotherhood in America that has declared itself engaged in "civilizational jihadist process" to destroy our way of life and replace it with an Islamic model, and repeated examples of one arm of the government attempting to prosecute elements of the Brotherhood while the other half vets their actions and cultural sensitivity programs against the same organizations. Or recall the DHS booth placed next to the Islamic revolutionary organization of Hizb ut-Tahrir at another Islamic conference.

National security strategy is policy and policy implies a theory -- a theory for action. To date we have no concrete theory of action because we have no fully articulated global threat model. We are seven years into a global war with armed combat and many dead and wounded, and yet still lack a common analytic paradigm to describe and model the enemy. It is a stunning failure to propel the country to war without a fully elaborated threat model that clarifies and specifies the enemy and makes clear our true objectives.

The lack of a threat model and a theory for action explains our schizophrenia, our failures and homeland security shortcomings.

Understanding the enemy -- "the threat," his threat doctrine and the authoritative statements, sources and philosophy undergirding that doctrine is a primary duty. That is the first step in developing a threat model. It is the vital step in the Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefieldprocess, to template enemy doctrine by laying it over the terrain: the physical, human and cultural terrain to understand its manifestations in reality. These are the first relevant questions to be answered for US national security analysis.

Our enemy says he is fighting jihad warfare to extend the Islamic faith; the basis of that claim rests on his exegesis of Quranic and Islamic Law injunctions. Irrespective of whether we or other Muslims accept or deny the legitimacy of his claim, if that is his stated doctrine, then that is the doctrine we must study and comprehend. That is the doctrine that will provide the indicators and warnings of future threats, that is the basis of our threat model.

That fact that other Muslims do not engage in violent jihad bears no relevance to our problem set or the analysis of those who do; it is a distraction and ancillary information that does not contribute to the threat model or understanding the enemy.

The fact is we have already so nuanced this war that we have failed to complete those required analyses. Our national security strategies and plans are so nuanced now as to be useless in terms of understanding the threat, defining it, clarifying it, modeling it. Read them, see if you can distill the enemy and orient on a clear objective. Even in our own strategic planning documents we admit to ourselves that we don't agree on the threat.

This completely contrasts with our well-developed threat model in the Cold War, beginning with NSC-68 and the containment policy, national security courses that taught Soviet ideology and world-view, the Soviet threat doctrine series published by DIA, and then wargaming against it at our military schools.. We understood them intellectually, philosophically, doctrinally from the very top down to the tactical bottom.

Seven years into this war we cannot say the same for the global jihad and have failed the same analytic and policy rigor. That is a serious error of omission.

Submission to Multiculturalism

Dr. Bernard Lewis, speaking recently at a luncheon and conference in Washington DC, noted that the two greatest shortcomings to understanding the Middle East are the "orthodoxy" of "political correctness and multiculturalism" and the reality that in the face of those driving ideologies, too many sworn to defend have proven themselves wilting lilies.

This new "no jihad policy" is the greatest of example.

Let's dissect the government message to show not only its folly, but factual errors that point to a lack of strategic comprehension and due diligence amounting to the level of an ethical failing.

An MSNBC article discussing this policy said this on the meaning of Jihad:

"For example, while Americans may understand "jihad" to mean "holy war," it is in fact a broader Islamic concept of the struggle to do good, says the guidance prepared for diplomats and other officials tasked with explaining the war on terror to the public."

That is wrong; it is in error. It is incompetently derived information.

Recall Patton famous exclamation: "Rommel I read your damn book".

This is the book our counter-terrorism communicators need to read. This is what sacred Islamic Law says on jihad:

"o9.0 - Jihad. Jihad means to wage war against non-Muslims, and is etymologically derived from the word mujahada, signifying warfare to establish the religion. [italic emphasis in original]"... The scriptural basis for jihad, prior to scholarly consensus (def: b7) is such Koranic verses as: (1) "Fighting is prescribed for you" (Koran 2:216); (2) "Slay them wherever you find them" (Koran 4:89); (3) "Fight the idolators utterly" (Koran 9:36); ... I have been commanded to fight people until they testify that there is no god but Allah and that Muhammad is the messenger of Allah, and perform the prayer, and pay zakat. If they say it, they have saved their blood and possessions from me, except for rights of Islam over them. (Umdat al-Salik p.599)"

Irrespective of the polemics, this is the only definition of jihad in Islamic law, this is the only controlling and binding definition of jihad for any Muslim.

So are we now to deduce from the media reporting that the US government, expects for example, those in military service to accept that waging "war against non-Muslims ...to establish the religion" is a "struggle to do good." Does our government consider jihad a "good" thing. Am I to accept that jihad is good for America?

Is this how far we have come with multiculturalism?

The Islamic Law of Nations

Al-Shaybani's Siyar, known as The Islamic Law of Nations, was drafted in the 9th century. It is described by Rudolf Peters as the first major Muslim work "devoted exclusively to Islamic law dealing with relations with non-Muslims." It is a body of law that Dr. Majid Khadduri noted,

"Muslims declared to be binding upon themselves, regardless of whether non-Muslims accept it."

Khadduri adds for context:

"The Islamic Law of Nations, however, is not a system separate from Islamic law. It is merely an extension of the sacred law."

And with respect to jihad, after discussing that the world is divided into two camps the dar-al Islam [house of submission] and the dar al-harb [the house of war] Khadduri elaborates the Siyar:

"The territory of war was the object, not the subject of the Islamic legal system and it was the duty of Muslim rulers to bring it under Islamic sovereignty whenever the strength was theirs to do so." The state of war existing between the dar al Islam and the dar al harb, however, does not necessarily means that actual hostilities must occur. The instrument which would transform the dar al-harb into the dar al Islam was the jihad. The jihad was not merely a duty to be fulfilled by each individual; it was also above all a political obligation imposed collectively on the subject of the states so as to achieve Islam's ultimate aim-the universalization of the faith and the establishment of God's sovereignty over the world. Thus the jihad was an individual duty, especially in the defense of Islam, as well as the collective duty on the community as a whole, and failure to fulfill it would constitute a gross error.

The jihad, in the broad sense of the term, did not necessarily call for violence or fighting, even though a state of war existed between Islamic and non-Islamic territories since Islam might achieve its ultimate goal by peaceful as well as by violent means. This participation might be fulfilled by the heart, the tongue or the hands, as well as by the sword. The jihad was accordingly a form of religious propaganda carried out by spiritual as well as by material means. (pp. 12-16)

Peace does not supersede the state of war, for the jihad is a legal duty prescribed by the law; peace means the grant of security or protection to the non-Muslims for certain specified purposes...Muslim authorities concluded peace treaties with the enemy only when it was to the advantage of Islam." (p. 54)

Additionally,

"It was Shafi'i [founder of the Shafi'i school of Islamic jurisprudence] who first formulated the doctrine that the jihad had for its intent the waging of war on unbelievers for their disbelief and not merely when they entered into conflict with Islam's. The jihad was thereby transformed into a collective duty enjoined on Muslim to fight the unbelievers "wherever you may find them."(p. 58)

So does the United States government also now considers [fighting] the unbelievers "wherever you may find them"(Quran 9.5) to be more "broadly" a "struggle to do good"?

"In Islamic legal theory, the jihad was a permanent obligation upon the believers to carried out by continuous process of warfare, psychological and political, if not strictly military. (p.16)

It is interesting to consider the "continuous process" of "psychological warfare": what better way to prosecute a war against your adversary than convincing those with whom you are at war with that you are not at war with them; to convince them not to use the language and the logic of the war.

No America they are not "jihadist" you face but "extremists".... miscreants, "evil-doers," murderers, "cultists," just really bad people.

Do the speech code writers understand the concept of "masking terrain" in war?

Finally Khadduri makes two additional points:

"If a Muslim entered the dar al-harb... he was under obligation to respect [and] observe its laws...but if conflicts arose between his own law and that of the territory, no doubt existed where his choice would lie."(p.14)"The jihad is the Islamic bellum justum and [is] the very basis of Islam's relations with other nations." (p. xi)

If you appreciate the above concepts then you understand their strategic ramifications and our challenge with respect to the "extremists."

That is why Brigadier S K Malik's Quranic Concept of War described jihad in terms of "grand strategy" and "total war" because it applies every element of force and suasion, every stratagem, every inducement and every coercion to submit the world to Islam. The "philosophy of war ... is an integral part of the total Quranic ideology" Malik stated. Note too, Malik was no Wahhabi or Salafist, he was a Pakistani general in 1979.

Importantly, Khadduri before is not merely waxing historical platitudes because he follows by saying:

"Jurists who came afterward, up unto the very decline of Muslim power, merely introduced refinements and elaborations of these basic principals. No essential difference among the leading jurist is to be found on this fundamental duty [of jihad], whether in orthodox or heterodox doctrine."(p.58 and 16 )

Do these wordsmiths understand the implication of what Khadduri is describing?

It means the jurists agree.

It means ulemic consensus.

It means al-ijma and that means that this legal obligation of jihad is "unquestionable truth" it cannot be ignored, abrogated, or contravened and for a Muslim to willingly deny the truth of jihad or of the religion "thereby becomes an unbeliever (kafir) and is executed for his unbelief. (Umdat al-Salik p. 109)

It means this applies today, now, tomorrow.

Do not doubt the jihadists of al-Qaida, and the al Qaida “movement” and the Muslim Brotherhood “movement” and Hizb ut-Tahrir, Lakshar e-Taiba, Jamaat-e-Islami, and Yusuf al-Qaradawi and Salah Sultan and Abdurahman Alamoudi, Sami al-Arian, Esam Omeish and Niwad Awad and all the rest of the affiliated Ikhwan front groups in America and mujtahid of the “global Islamic movement” fully understand this. Do not doubt that any schooled Muslim does not understand these tenets of jihad as well whether they adhere to them or not.

Can the drafter and the approval authority of that Homeland Security report cite where the terrorists "lack moral and religious legitimacy?" Can they cite their incontrovertible sourcing? If so I want to see it; I have searched for it.

The closest I can come would be the Spanish fatwa, whose import in the rest of the Islamic world was questioned, while most readers would not understand the legal nuance of "innocence" in Islamic law. The fiqh council of North America, itself tainted as a Muslim Brotherhood entity, also issued its own fatwa that was in fact challenged as non-specific and fraudulent,

Can the memo-writers point to any universal ulemic denunciations against al-Qaida or denouncement from the major Islamic centers or key muftis across the Middle East?

Shmuel Bar noted its absence in his "Jihadist Ideology in Light of Current Fatwas":

"[This] is a one-sided battle; the radicals are on the offensive, whereas counter-attacks of moderates are few and far between. Fatwas commanding terror can only be countered by a clear opposing consensus (ijma') of mainstream ‘ulama. Such a consensus does not exist. This is due, inter alia, to the deference that mainstream ‘ulama feel towards the radicals as the quintessential believers, and the sense that they are competing with the radicals over the same constituency. Such deference is strengthened in Islam by orthodox Islam's aversion to declarations of heresy (takfir) and the fear of igniting internal conflict (fitnah). It is in the home field of this presumed silent majority that the main battle is taking place, and as long as it does not enter the fray, the battle cannot be won."

It is the silence that is the consent and legitimacy.

No Jihad means No War of Ideas

From the NCTC guidelines:

"We suggest you avoid the term 'al-Qaida movement,' which implies a degree of political legitimacy (e.g., 'labor movement,' 'civil rights movement,' 'women's movement:'. . .). There is no legitimacy to al-Qaida's activities."

This is ahistorical.

First the roots of al-Qaida lie in the in the movement of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is the international "global Islamic movement." See the Holy Land Foundation documents at the NEFA Foundation and even Dr. Marc Sageman's first book, Understanding Terrorist Networks. The al-Qaida ideology and jihad and the Muslim Brotherhood constitute a movement, and it is moving right past the competency of the drafters of this claptrap.

Secondly, the recommendation begs the question by claiming "there is no legitimacy to al-Qaida's activities." Who says so? Produce the quantitative demographic analysis and ulemic rulings to substantiate that claim.

But maybe this is how we win the war of ideas; declare there is no ideological movement and it all goes away sort of like calling "gangs" a "crew".

So, considering last year's anniversary 9-11 Senate hearing on global threats, one can imagine this year's carrying on the same thinking:

Senator Lieberman- "What is your strategy for the war of ideas?" FBI Director Mueller- "Sir, there is no war of ideas."

Lieberman- "No? What do you mean?" Mueller- "I'm not sure how to express it; because we can't use the words therefore I have no ideas."

Again the NCTC:

"Do not use 'ummah' to mean 'the Muslim world.' It is not a sociological term, rather, it is a theological construct not used in everyday life."

Wrong.

"[We] should recall that Islam is not merely a set of religious ideas and practices but also a political community (the umma)," Dr. Majid Khadduri reminds us. "The umma, composed of all those who profess the Islamic faith, is the immediate point of reference for every believer." It seems our "experts" disagree about the concept of umma in everyday Muslim life.

From the NCTC Memo:

"Don't Take the Bait: When Osama bin Ladin or others try to draw the USG into a debate, we should offer only minimal, if any, response to their messages. When we respond loudly, we raise their prestige in the Muslim world."

Osama bin Ladin is not debating us. If he is debating anyone it is his fellow Muslims over the mandate of jihad and the doctrine of Loyalty and Enmity.

And another:

"In Arabic, jihad means "striving in the path of God" and is used in many contexts beyond warfare. Calling our enemies jihadis and their movement a global jihad unintentionally legitimizes their actions."

That is a non-sequitur; it presumes a cause and effect based on our word choices in the West. Again, al-Qaida is legitimate or illegitimate based on what the Muslim ulema say about al-Qaida not us; but more importantly, in any language and in Islamic law jihad means "warfare to establish the faith."

And this:

"Avoid the term 'caliphate,' which has positive connotations for Muslims, to describe the goal of al-Qaida and associated groups. The best description of what they really want to create is a 'global totalitarian state.'"

You say "caliphate" I say a "global totalitarian state." Maybe the crafters of nuance don't realize how loaded their rejoinder is.

Finally this analysis from Jeffrey Imm Writing in the Counter Terrorism Blog, he notes the 9-11 Commission Report on the topic of jihad:

"The 9/11 Commission Report uses the term "jihad" in referencing the enemy 79 times and specifically defines "jihad" as a "holy war" executed by Osama Bin Laden and his compatriots (Section 2.3, Paragraph #302 on page 55), as well as defining "mujahideen" as "holy warriors" (Paragraph #302, same page). The 9/11 Commission Report refers to such "mujahideen" 22 times.

The 9/11 Commission Report refers to the term "jihadist" 31 times, including the references to the "worldwide jihadist community" (Section 5.1, Paragraph #691 on page 148), to "Islamist Jihadists" (Section 5.3, Paragraph #741 on page 158), to "Islamist and jihadist movements" (Section 6.3, Paragraph #887 on page 191), and multiple references to an NSC memo on "Jihadist Networks".

Most importantly, the 9/11 Commission Report provides the definition of "Islamist terrorism" as being based on the ideology of "Islamism" (Notes, Part 12, Note 3: "Islamism", page 562)."

In light of the NCTC and State Department GWOT lexicon guidelines one must surmise that the 9-11 Commission Report should now be withdrawn from public consumption and all must stop referencing it.

I submit the people advocating this line of argument are either unstudied as to what they are saying, or if the sourcing for these lines of argument can be traced to their original roots, then I would wager those roots are in the strategic disinformation of the "global Islamic movement."

One must also question if those recommending and making these decisions have a doctrinal understanding of any of the original lexicon, much less intellectual preparation to change it to something else. Has anyone considered that maybe our perceptions are being shaped by the jihadists as much as we think we are shaping foreign perceptions?

Caution reminds us that to the extent we outsource our knowledge base we outsource our decisions. To the extent we do this with our knowledge of Islam and Islamic jihad we do so at risk.

This lexicon change represents systemic organizational failure: a professional failure and the failure to know is a failure of leadership.

As Dr. Bernard Lewis asked last week, "where does ignorance end and falsehood begin."

Joseph C. Myers writes and speaks on terrorism and homeland security issues and is completing his PhD in public policy. He recently presented a paper for the Association of scholars for the Study of Middle East and Africa.

After his wife of more than two decades filed for divorce in Montgomery County Circuit Court, Irfan Aleem responded in writing in 2003, and not just in court.

Aleem went to the Pakistani Embassy in the District, where he executed a written document that asserted he was divorcing Farah Aleem. He performed "talaq," exercising a provision of Islamic religious and Pakistani secular law that allows husbands to divorce their wives by declaring "I divorce thee" three times. In Muslim countries, men have used talaq to leave their wives for centuries.

But they can't use it in Maryland, the state's highest court decided this week.

The state Court of Appeals issued a unanimous 21-page opinion Tuesday declaring that talaq is contrary to Maryland's constitutional provisions providing equal rights to men and women.

"Talaq lacks any significant 'due process' for the wife, its use, moreover, directly deprives the wife of the 'due process' she is entitled to when she initiates divorce litigation in this state. The lack and deprivation of due process is itself contrary to this state's public policy," the court wrote.The decision affirms a 2007 ruling by the Court of Special Appeals, the state's intermediate appellate court, which also said that talaq does not apply in the Free State.

Under Islamic traditions, talaq can be invoked only by a husband, unless he grants his wife the same right.

According to the Court of Appeals' opinion, Irfan Aleem, who worked for years as an economist with the World Bank, is worth about $2 million, half of which Farah Aleem is entitled to under Maryland law. When Irfan Aleem tried to divorce his wife under the concept of talaq, a sum of $2,500 was mentioned as a "full and final" settlement, according to the appellate decision.

That amount was written into the marriage contract Farah Aleem signed the day she married him in their native Pakistan in 1980, according to the appellate decision. The contract was in accordance with Pakistani custom. At the time, he was 29 and she was 18. The couple moved to the Washington area in 1985.

"I don't even know how to express how happy I am. I am ecstatic, relieved," Farah Aleem, 46, said yesterday.

Over the years, a lack of financial support from her ex-husband caused hardship for her and her son and daughter, who are in college, she said. "All I ever wanted was my fair share, not a penny more," said Aleem, who lives in the Washington area, works full time for an accounting firm and is pursuing an accounting degree at night.

At the direction of the judge who presided over the Aleems' divorce proceedings, the couple's Potomac home was sold, and half the proceeds -- about $200,000 -- went to Farah Aleem, said Susan Friedman, her attorney.

Friedman said she thinks that Irfan Aleem, who retired in recent years, invoked talaq to avoid paying Farah half of his World Bank pension, which provides him with $90,000 annually, the attorney said.

"It will be very pleasant when [Farah] gets her share of that," Friedman said. "She's delighted about that."

Friedman said she will serve papers on the World Bank showing that the original order from the Circuit Court -- that Farah Aleem is entitled to half her ex-husband's pension -- is now final and that the bank has to give her half.

Irfan Aleem, who is in his late 50s, lives in Pakistan, Friedman said.His attorney, Priya R. Aryar, said, "We're very disappointed with the decision. We think this could have adverse ramifications for a whole bunch of people who reside in the D.C. area under diplomatic visas and assume that their family law rights and obligations are governed by the laws of their country of citizenship."

A legal scholar and an Islamic leader said the appellate court's decision was not surprising.

"For the most part, Muslims expected this kind of ruling," said Muneer Fareed, secretary general of the Islamic Society of North America in Plainfield, Ind. "The contrary would be a surprise to them. They do not expect the U.S. legal system to give full recognition of talaq."Julie Macfarlane, a legal scholar who is researching a book about Islamic divorces in North America, said the decision was not surprising. "There's no legal enforceability [for talaq] in U.S. courts," said Macfarlane, a professor at the University of Windsor in Canada.

CAIR-OH revisited, 1999: CAIR-OH rushes to aid pre-9/11 dry-run hijackersBut the appearance of Siraj Wahhaj, who was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, as the keynote speaker for the 2006 CAIR-OH annual banquet has to rank among one of the most despicable acts in that group's ten years of existence.

And following the banquet featuring Wahhaj, CAIR-OH bragged in a press release how the Wahhaj fundraiser had netted them more than $100,000 in one evening to help spread their hate speech and terror apologies. Here is the CAIR press release following the event (click to enlarge):

In a March 2006 article, "CAIR's Blood Money", I prefaced my evaluation of CAIR-OH's activities with this historical reflection:

At 12:17 pm on February 26, 1993, a 1,500lb urea-nitrate fuel-oil bomb hidden inside a rental van caused a massive explosion that ripped through the parking garage of the World Trade Center, killing six people and injuring another 1,042 – the first large-scale terrorist attack on U.S. soil by Islamic extremists. The terrorists had intended to topple one of the buildings onto the other, potentially killing tens of thousands of innocent Americans. Sadly, the fourteenth anniversary of that event passed last week with very little discussion by major media outlets, even though that lethal attack by Islamic terrorists ominously foreshadowed the unspeakable horror of 9/11.

At 8:00 pm on June 6, 2006, the Ohio affiliate of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-OH) honored one of the unindicted conspirators in that 1993 World Trade Center bombing, Siraj Wahhaj, a Brooklyn, NY imam that had also served as a defense witness at the trial of one of the men convicted for that terrorist attack, the “Blind Sheikh” Omar Abdel-Rahman (a conviction that CAIR has labeled “a travesty of justice”). More than 400 CAIR-OH supporters gathered at this fundraising banquet.Read the whole article. And consider the terrible legacy of hatred and terrorist support that CAIR-OH has wrought over the past decade.

"Many political and religious groups try to use the textbook process to their advantage, but the deficiencies in Islam-related lessons are uniquely disturbing. History textbooks present an incomplete and confected view of Islam that misrepresents its foundations and challenges to international security."The report finds that the texts present "disputed definitions and claims [regarding Islam] … as established facts.""Islamic activists use multiculturalism and ready-made American-made political movements, especially those on campus, to advance and justify the makeover of Islam-related textbook content," the report continued."Particular fault rests with the publishing corporations, boards of directors, and executives who decide what editorial policies their companies will pursue," the report said.Reviewed were:<LI dbPHh="0" wiRFj="0">Medieval and Early Modern Times by Jackson J. Spielvogal

<LI dbPHh="0" wiRFj="0">Medieval to Early Modern Times by Stanley M. Bernstein and Richard Shek

World Medieval and Early Modern Times by Douglas Carnine, Carlos Cortes, Kenneth R. Curtis and Anita T. Robinson

Medieval and Early Modern Times by Dianne Hart

History Alive! The Medieval World and Beyond by Bert Bower and Jim Lobdell

World History: The Modern World by Elizabeth Gaynor Ellis and Anthony Esler

World History: Modern Times by Jackson J. Spielvogel

America: Pathways to the Present by Andrew Cayton and others

The American Vision: Moder Times by Joyce Appelby and others andThe Americans: Reconstruction to the Twenty-first Century by Gerald A. DanzerThe report noted that several of the textbooks have found harsh critics among parents and others, and "History Alive! The Medieval World and Beyond" published by the privately held Curriculum Institute has been criticized repeatedly.In Lodi, Calif., parents "were not objecting to a word or two that they took out of context but to a textbook long on chapters filled with adulatory lessons on Islam."This was the same book cited by parents who contacted WND with their concerns about such indoctrination.A parent whose child has been handed the text in a Sacramento district at that time accused the publisher of a pro-Muslim bias to the point that Islamic theology has been incorporated into the public teachings.

"It makes an attempt to seem like an egalitarian world history book, but on closer inspection you find that seven (not all are titled so) of the chapters deal with Islam or Muslim subjects," wrote the parent, whose name was being withheld, in a letter to WND."The upsetting part is not only do they go into the history (which would be acceptable) but also the teaching of Islam," she said. "This book does not really go into Christianity or the teachings of Christ, nor does it address religious doctrine elsewhere to the degree it does Islam."She said the book's one page referencing Jews "is only to convey that they were tortured by Crusaders to get them to convert to 'Christianity.' (It fails to mention that the biggest persecutors of Jews throughout history and still today are Arab Muslims). It gives four other one-liner references to the Jews being blamed for the plagues and problems in the land. It does not talk about the Jews as making a significant impact on the culture at large."Bert Bower, founder of TCI, told WND at that time not only did his company have experts review the book, but the state of California also reviewed it, and has approved it for use in public schools."Keep in mind when looking at this particular book scholars from all over California (reviewed it)," he said.One of those experts who contributed to the text, according to the ATC, which earlier released a scathing indictment of that specific project, was Ayad Al-Qazzaz."Al-Qazzaz is a Muslim apologist, a frequent speaker in Northern California school districts promoting Islam and Arab causes," the ATC review said. "Al-Qazzaz also co-wrote AWAIR's 'Arab World Notebook.' AWAIR stands for Arab World and Islamic Resources, an opaque, proselytizing 'non-profit organization' that conducts teacher workshops and sells supplementary materials to schools."

===========The newest report cited the same issue raised by parents."In a passage meant to explain jihad, they encountered this: 'Muslims should fulfill jihad with the heart, tongue, and hand. Muslims use the heart in their struggle to resist evil. The tongue may convince others to take up worthy causes, such as funding medical research. Hands may perform good works and correct wrongs,'" the new report said.The ATC report noted a complicating factor is a ban in California, to whose standards most textbook publishers align their work, on "adverse reflection" on religion inGeorgia.

"Whatever 'adverse reflection' is, such a mandate may be conceptually at odds with historical and geopolitical actuality," the study said."None of this is accidental. Islamic organizations, willing to [provide] misinformation, are active in curriculum politics. These activists are eager to expunge any critical thought about Islam from textbook and all public discourse. They are succeeding, assisted by partisan scholars and associations… It is alarming that so many individuals with the power to shape the curriculum are willfully blind to or openly sympathetic to these efforts," the report said.Regarding the TCI book, the report said its lessons contain "stilted language that seem scripted or borrowed from devotional, not historical, material." Also, the "Medieval to Early Modern Times" book features a two-page prayer to Allah "the Merciful.""Among the textbooks examined, the editorial caution that marks coverage of Christian and Jewish beliefs vanishes in presenting Islam's foundations. With materials laden with angels, revelations, miracles, prayers, and sacred exclamations; the story of the Zamzam well; and the titles 'Messenger of God' and 'Prophet of Islam' the seventh-grade textbooks cross the line into something other than history, that is, scripture or myth."Among the lessons public school students must learn from the various books:Muhammad "taught equality"

Fasting reminds Muslims of people who struggle to get enough food

Muhammad told his followers to make sure guests never left a table hungryArab traditions include being kind to strangers and helping needy"These effusive formulations stop just short of invention and raise questions about the sources of information," the report said.The books' praises of Islam continues, the report said. "TCI devotes 13 text-heavy pages to textiles, calligraphy, design, books, city building, architecture, mathematics, medicine, polo, and chess, some of it spun like cotton candy," the report said.For example, the book reports: "Singing was an essential part of Muslim Spain's musical culture. … Although this music is lost today, it undoubtedly influenced later musical forms in Europe and North Africa.""Undoubtedly, the TCI volume declares. Yet the book acknowledges the music is lost and the claims are speculative. Empty text dilates Islamic achievements," the report said.Glossing over the actual physical conquering of some peoples, the "World History: Medieval and Early Modern Times" says people were converted to Islam because they were "attracted by Islam's message of equality and hope for salvation," the report said.Another book teaches: "Q: How did the caliphs who expanded the Muslim Empire treat those they conquered? A: They treated them with tolerance."

"At a time when intolerance marks Islamic cultures worldwide and multiculturalism is a ruling idea in U.S. schools, these 'wonderland-of-tolerance' tropes constitute a major content distortion," the report said.The books teach the Crusades were "religious wars launched against Muslims by European Christians.""When … Muslims groups attack Christian peoples, kill them, and take their lands, the process is referred to as 'building' an empire. Christian attempts to restore those lands are labeled as 'violent attacks' or 'massacres,'" the report said.Some of the books are rife with other errors. In the TCI book, it says the Crusaders wore red crosses. "No. Only Templars did," said the report."While Christian belligerence is magnified, Islamic inequality, subjugation, and enslavement get the airbrush," said the report, which also found inaccuracies in teaching about sharia religious law, women's rights and terrorism, especially the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, which killed nearly 3,000.

"The Modern World" says, "On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, teams of terrorists hijacked four airplanes on the East Coast. Passengers challenged the hijackers on one flight, which they crashed on the way to its target. But one plane plunged into the Pentagon in Virginia, and two others slammed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York…""The flatness and brevity of this passage are dismaying. In terms of content, so much is left unanswered. Who were the teams of terrorists and what did they want to do? What were their political ends? Since 'The Modern World' avoids any hint of the connection between this unnamed terrorism and jihad, why September 11 happened is hard to understand," the report said.

On Mother's Day: 2nd Largest Mosque in North America Honors . . .By Debbie Schlussel. . . a woman who proudly proclaims she's embarrassed to be an American, and is the "mother" of thousands of Muslim anchor babies she helped get delivered here through Medicaid fraud.That's right, for its Mother's Day program, last night, the Islamic House of Wisdom--Dar Al-Hikma--the 2nd largest mosque in North America, is honoring Najah Bazzy, about whom I've written a great deal.Ms. Bazzy--the Muslim Nurse Ratched--is a very interesting candidate for Muslims to pick as their "Mother of the Year." You see, as head transcultural nurse for Dearbornistan's Oakwood Hospital, she was intimately involved in Medicaid fraud, in which she served as translator and co-conspirator for pregnant Muslim aliens who used phony social security numbers to get Medicaid to cover the births of their babies (they also got U.S. citizenship for those babies--citizenship which can be traded on the open market, since there are no hard-and-fast identifying items on the birth certificate but for the gender).Najah Bazzy:Embarrassed to Be American; Not Embarrassed About Medicaid FraudIn addition to that, Najah Bazzy told participants in a 2004 CAIR-Michigan political event, "I'm embarrassed to be an American." As I always say, we're embarrassed you're an American, too, Najah Bazzy. Bazzy was excoriated by Republican Congressman Thaddeus McCotter who was shocked that any Muslim born and raised in America would say such a thing. I wasn't shocked. That's their usual proclamation when they think they are "among friends."And finally, Najah Bazzy, was the proud donor of an interesting "exhibit" at the Arab American National Museum--a propaganda videotape, which lies about Israel's conduct in Jenin during the height of Muslim homicide bombings in Israel. As we all know, even the pan-Palestinian U.N. reports that only about 26 people died--not the 500 claimed on the baloney-tape--at Jenin, and most of those deaths were attributable to causes--natural and Palestinian--other than the Israelis.And you might remember Najah Bazzy from her whining press conference, last year, demanding that Northwest Airlines reimburse Muslims who missed their flights returning from the Hajj (Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia), even though they arrived late. She and the other whiners, predictably, succeeded in getting Dhimmi Airline, Northwest, to reimburse them AND start a whole new round of Muslim sensitivity training taught by CAIR.

No shocker that the Islamic House of Wisdom is featuring her for its Mother's Day event, since--as I've repeatedly noted--this mosque is headed by Imam Mohammed Ali Elahi, former spiritual leader of Ayatollah Khomeini's Iranian Navy, and longtime buddy of Hezbollah spiritual leaders Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah.Yep, this is the "Mother of the Year" for Shi'ite Muslims in America. Well they got one part right. She's definitely, as they say, a "Mother" . . . . And, yes, sadly, she has kids who share her unique brand of hatred, phoniness, and anti-American politics.Like I said, more Americans than Ms. Bazzy are embarrassed she's an American.I think I like the way Cosa Nostra celebrates Mother's Day a whole lot better than the way Shi'ite Muslims do.

Posted by Debbie at May 11, 2008 01:59 PM==================================SCSU student leaves training at Technical High School

A St. Cloud State University student in a teacher-training program at Technical High School left the school in late April because he says he feared for the safety of his service dog.The school district calls it a misunderstanding, and officials there say they hoped Tyler Hurd, a 23-year-old junior from Mahtomedi who aspires to teach special education, would continue his training in the district.Hurd said a student threatened to kill his service dog named Emmitt. The black lab is trained to protect Hurd when he has seizures.The seizures, which can occur weekly, are from a childhood injury.The dog has a pouch on his side that assists those who stop to help Hurd.Hurd said he was unable to finish his 50 hours of field training at Tech. The university waived the remaining 10 hours, he said. He plans to do his student teaching outside a high school setting.“We came up with a solution because I felt threatened by it," Hurd said.The school district and university are working to make sure a similar situation doesn't happen.Kate Steffens, dean of the college of education at St. Cloud State, and Tech assistant principal Lori Lockhart met Thursday.The threat came from a Somali student who is Muslim, according to Hurd, St. Cloud State and school district officials.The Muslim faith, which is the dominant faith of Somali immigrants, forbids the touching of dogs.Hurd trained at Talahi Community School and Tech. He said his experience at Talahi was good. The Somali students there warmed to the dog and eventually petted him using paper to keep their hands off his fur, Hurd said.Things didn't go as well at Tech, Hurd said. Students there taunted his dog, and he finally felt he had to leave after he was told a student made a threat. Hurd met with Lockhart but said he did not feel comfortable continuing.Julia Espe, director of curriculum, instruction and assessment for St. Cloud school district, said the school needed to do a better job communicating.“I think it was a misunderstanding where we didn't really prepare either side for possible implications," Espe said.Espe said the school's investigation determined the student did not make a direct threat.“We certainly welcome (Hurd) in our district, and we hope we can get this all resolved so he feels welcome and his dog is welcome," Espe said.St. Cloud State places about 1,000 students in 240 schools to help prepare them for careers in education.In St. Cloud school district, 330 are in the field training program Hurd was in and 94 are in student teaching.Steffens said it is important to respect different cultures and the rights of disabled students.“I think this is part of the growth process when we become more diverse," Steffens said.Steffens called Hurd a good student and committed young man.Gary Loch, who is the diversity coordinator for the district, said the situation was an unfortunate case of miscommunication.“I'm not quite sure where the breakdown comes into play here," Loch said.http://www.sctimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll...WS01/105120058

In an attempt to report about the new findings from the Department of Education Monday, 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS went to Tarik ibn Zayad Academy in Inver Grove Heights. While on school grounds, our crew was confronted by school officials. Our photographer was injured while wrestling with the two men over the camera. Our photographer was examined by paramedics and suffered minor shoulder and back injuries.

The state education department on Monday directed the charter school to "correct" two areas related to religion at the school on Monday.

Tarik ibn Zayad Academy, which focuses on Middle Eastern culture and shares a mosque with the Muslim American Society of Minnesota, came under fire after a teacher alleged that the school was offering religious instruction in Islam to its students.

"The Minnesota Department of Education goes to great lengths to make clear to charter schools and their sponsors that, while schools should appropriately accomodate students' religious beliefs, they must be 'nonsectarian' under the state's charter school law," said the state's education Deputy Commissioner Chas Anderson.

The allegations first surfaced after an article by a columnist for the Star Tribune. The Education Department subsequently began a review of the south metro school and released its findings Monday. The agency said it was concerned about the school, with about 300 students, accommodating communal prayer and providing transportation to an after-school religious program.

"We have directed the school to take appropriate corrective actions regarding these matters and will continue to provide oversight to ensure that the school is in compliance with state and federal law," Anderson said.

To avoid blurring the line between religion and public education, a Twin Cities charter school must undertake "corrective actions," the state Department of Education said Monday. Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy, which teaches hundreds of Muslim students at its Inver Grove Heights and Blaine campuses, should modify its communal prayers on Fridays to make sure students aren't missing too much school, according to the state report. The report also recommends the school provide after-school busing at different times for students who aren't participating in religious activities. State officials did not have any concerns with the school's instruction or curriculum. "With regard to the areas reviewed, most of TiZA's operations are in compliance with state and federal law," Deputy Commissioner Chas Anderson said in a statement. The state's most important finding is that TiZA is not teaching Islam to students, said Asad Zaman, the school's executive director. "When something is illegal, it's illegal," he said. "We have done nothing illegal." He called the state's concerns minor but said the K-8 school will cooperate with the department to propose alternative schedules. Many TiZA students take five minutes Monday through Thursday to pray, and this causes little interruption, according to the report. But on Fridays — the Muslim holy day — a 30-minute chunk of time is set aside for students to pray. The department is concerned that students who pray that day may not fulfill the state's minimum hourly attendance requirement, that the prayer takes place in a public school building, and that younger students may not understand that teachers who decide to pray with them are not promoting Islam. Zaman, who does not participate in the prayer time, said community volunteers run the Friday prayer in the school gymnasium. The state's other concern is with the school's transportation schedule: School is dismissed around 3:30 p.m.,

but no busing is provided until about 4:30 p.m. — when after-school activities end. According to the report, some Inver Grove Heights students participate in a Muslim studies class that the adjacent Muslim American Society of Minnesota runs. The school said it does not track the number of students enrolled in the class. Meanwhile, about 30 percent to 40 percent of the school's 400 or so students participate in the school's free program called CARE, which teaches students about empathy-building, problem-solving and anger management. The school also offers Girl Scouts, Boys Scouts and community volunteer activities. The bus arrives at the later hour to accommodate families, said Zaman, who added that it was preferred by 98 percent of parents. It's also a financial move, because it is nearly $100,000 more expensive to bus students at 3:30 p.m., Zaman said. The school already has discussed several scheduling solutions, Zaman said. "We cannot solve everything right away," he said. "But this is not an unsolvable problem." A columnist for the Star Tribune of Minneapolis, Katherine Kersten, sparked the investigation after she wrote that the school mixed the roles of religion and public education. Her column aired a substitute teacher's allegations that school officials promoted Islam in the classroom. The school has received numerous threats and installed a new security system as a result of the column, Zaman said. State officials acknowledged that TiZA has received threatening messages and thanked school staff for cooperating at a time when students and employees were concerned for their safety. The controversy has sparked national and local media attention, and on Monday, a KSTP-TV photographer had his camera briefly confiscated after he walked onto school property and began filming students as classes let out. Inver Grove Heights police officials said they were called to the scene, but as of Monday evening, no arrests had been made or citations handed out. Joe Nathan, director for the Center for School Change at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute, said the controversy surrounding the school has diverted attention from the school's success in working with students from first-generation immigrant families. Zaman agrees. "We will continue to follow the law," he said. "It's in the best interest of the children and community." Bao Ong can be reached at 651-228-5435.

This appeals to my deranged sense of humor. I am not without sympathy for the man.===================

Muslim man threatens to sue driving school for sending transsexual instructor to teach his wife

By Chris BrookeLast updated at 9:45 AM on 21st May 2008

For the past 12 months, she had proudly taken to the road as part of an all-female driving school.

But Emma Sherdley is not exactly all woman.Until a few years ago she was a married father-of-two called Andrew.

She is, though, in the middle of treatment to change gender and has the legal paperwork to prove it.

But that wasn't enough to satisfy one client who claimed he had been shortchanged when he booked a female instructor to teach his wife how to drive.

He phoned the Laugh 'n' Pass driving school threatening to sue after Miss Sherdley, 42, turned up for the lesson.

'You have sent me a man. Send me a proper female. How dare you send a man with a deep voice,' he told Joanne Dixon, who runs the school in West Yorkshire.

The man, a Muslim from the Meadowhall district of Sheffield who has not been named, claimed the company deliberately sent a man disguised as a woman.

'His attitude and behaviour was outrageous and has upset me and Emma and everyone else who works here,' Miss Dixon said.

'We are not racist. We are not sexist-If anyone was being so it was that man.'

She said no other learners had complained about being taught by Miss Sherdley, an experienced instructor.

As for Miss Sherdley, she is trying to develop a thicker skin.

She said the man's comments had been 'hurtful, offensive and deeply upsetting' and had even made her think of quitting her job.

His wife had apparently cut their two-hour lesson short after an hour, claiming she had to go home to breastfeed her baby.

Miss Sherdley said: 'I always knew as a child that I was a woman stuck in a man's body.

'I tried hard to be a man, getting married and having children but it never worked and never would.

'For the past six years I have been what is correctly called "transitioned". I still have to undergo final surgery but legally I am a woman.

That is what my birth certificate says and that is what the gender recognition certificate proves. For that prejudiced and biased man to threaten to sue me and the driving school is totally and utterly wrong.'

There are currently 32 female pupils on the books at the school. Miss Dixon employs 20 female instructors who teach learners throughout Yorkshire.

The school, which has been running for ten years, boasts a high pass rate.

'We say each of our female instructors promise to be friendly, professional and patient - that is exactly what Emma is,' Miss Dixon said.